策略书四：臃肿的软件和80/20神话

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.

微软的旗舰电子表格程序Excel的5.0版于1993年问世。它非常巨大：它需要整整15兆字节的硬盘空间。在那些日子里，我们仍然记得我们的第一个20MB的PC硬盘（大约在1985年），所以15MB似乎是一个很大的数字。

By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB … almost a tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?

到了Excel 2000出来的时候，它需要高达146MB的容量......几乎增加了10倍!那些马虎的微软程序员真该死，对吗？

Wrong.

错了。

I’ll bet you think I’m going to write one of those boring articles you see all over the net  bemoaning “bloatware”.  Whine whine whine, this stuff is so bloated, oh woe is me, edlin and vi are so much better than Word and Emacs because they are svelte, etc.

我敢打赌，你认为我会写那些你在网上看到的抱怨 "臃肿的软件 "的无聊文章之一。 抱怨抱怨，这东西太臃肿了，哦，我真可怜，edlin和vi比Word和Emacs好得多，因为它们很轻巧，等等。

Ha ha! I tricked you! I’m not going to write that article again, because it’s not true.

哈 哈!我骗了你!我不会再写那篇文章了，因为那不是真的。

In 1993, given the cost of hard drives in those days, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space.

1993年，考虑到当时的硬盘成本，微软Excel 5.0占用了价值约36美元的硬盘空间。

In 2000, given the cost of hard drives in 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space.

在2000年，考虑到2000年的硬盘成本，Microsoft Excel 2000占据了大约1.03美元的硬盘空间。

(These figures are adjusted for inflation and based on hard drive price data from here.)

(这些数字是根据通货膨胀调整的，并基于这里的硬盘价格数据）。

In real terms, it’s almost like Excel is actually getting smaller!

从实际情况来看，这几乎就像Excel实际上是在变小一样!

What is bloatware, exactly? The Jargon File snidely defines it as “software that provides minimal functionality while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory. Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is very common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.”

究竟什么是臃肿的软件？The Jargon File冷酷地将其定义为 "提供最小功能的软件，同时需要不成比例的磁盘空间和内存。特别是用于应用程序和操作系统的升级。这个术语在Windows/NT世界中非常常见。其原因也是如此"。

I guess those guys just ...