Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot. By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB… almost a tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?
Wrong.
In 1993, given the cost of hard drives in those days, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space. In 2000, given the cost of hard drives in 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space. (These figures are adjusted for inflation and based on hard drive price data from here.)
In real terms, it’s almost like Excel is actually getting smaller!
| Author | Joel Spolsky |
| Work | Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth |