[musicale]

Office is what, 80M lines of code? Impossible for any human to understand.

I expect it is only added to because 1) nobody understands what would happen if you removed something and 2) if you intentionally or inadvertently remove some obscure feature then it breaks the workflow for people who inexplicably depended on that feature.

[andrekandre]

i think in addition to what you say, there are probably also the issues of just running a business...

new releases need new features → bloat

managers need promotions → hire more devs → more bloat

devs need promotions/evaluations → refactorings/abstractions → extra bloat

corporate dictums/strategies (add .net this and that) → bloat city

people leave → knowledge is lost → old code gets worked around/stuck → bloat

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just a crazy supposition, but i'd guess programs/apps that stay under the radar stay small and maintainable, programs and apps that are popular suffer from a smothering of resources/people that inevitably bloat it up (just look at itunes for another example)