This is the article I was mentioning in-person last night, about Windows and Word getting slower through the years.

www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/14/16TC-winoffice-performance_1.html

Fat, fatter, fattest: Microsoft’s kings of bloat
Our tests show that Windows Vista and Office 2007 not only smash Redmond’s previous records for weight gain, but given the same hardware diet, run at less than half the speed of generation XP

By Randall C. Kennedy
April 14, 2008

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (aka Wintel) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007, which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes more than 12 times as much memory and nearly three times as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just seven short years ago, Office 2000.

I don’t think it’s fair, necessarily, to pick on Microsoft in this area — because I think you could chart this for any software application anywhere. With managed code getting more popular, I don’t see that changing. It’s just interesting to see this trend charted with Office apps.