I have noticed that almost every software that Microsoft are eating up a lot of hard disk space in my computer. Its not that I don't have enough hard disk space, I have 80 GB and that is enough for personal use. But when I was in college, I had a hard time uninstalling programs so that I could fit in another new program into my very small hard disk, which is about 4GB only. Any ideas why MS products are big in size?
It's not just MS products. Nearly every application written can be made smaller in size while keeping the same feature set. Large, cheap hard drives and inexpensive memory has made programmers very lazy. Why optimize if you don't have to?
Generally open source programs are smaller in size (mozilla vs IE). Priced versions although may have similar functions, will generally tend to gulp extra gb so that you will be thinking that you are paying some extra buck for THAT (?) extra features