Office 2007, you're pushing my buttons! / Micosoft Inefficiency .NET

This is unacceptable! A mail client should not use the same amount of resources as GIS software. I am convinced that Outlook 2007 is making my other programs crash. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Office 2007 missed the mark.

Here is a screenshot of my ArcMap editing session:


I am running Windows Media Player in the background with with 200+ songs on the playlist (topping out around 20,000 k of memory usage). I am assuming WMP references the songs via a list rather than caching all the 855 MB of files, however my media player is using fewer resources than my mail client is using.

Outlook is hogging just short of the almost 200,000 k that ArcMap uses - and it's just sitting there:

Rather than trying to make Office and Windows look like a Mac, why doesn't Microsoft take what they already have a make it more efficient? After that, go ahead and add the neat little trinkets (about which I honestly couldn't care less). There is absolutely no reason for my mail client to use such vast amounts of memory and processing power to sit there and ding a few dozen times a day.

Personal computer technology continues to increase at a terrific rate, and the price of powerful and small computers is steadily decreasing. The average user (non-tech/home computer user) seems to be utilizing web-based resources more and more. Other than gaming, I can only think of a few other examples of power users who need very elite computers: photo/graphics editors and video editors.

Taking advantage of this by writing software that runs efficiently would allow one to use a computer for more than a few years without it being bogged down (I'm looking at you, Windows XP). It takes my laptop a few minutes to open Mozilla. MINUTES! That is just stupid.

Instead, Microsoft continues to write clunky software that needlessly hogs computing resources so when the computer seems to become "out of date" in a year or two, unknowing consumers will go out and buy another laptop with a new and even more inefficient version of Windows products. This seems like planned obsolesence. Lame.

Well, I'm glad to see that Dell (and others I'm sure) is giving the option for new computers to be loaded with the free Ubuntu (Linux) OS. I've been meaning to give Linux a try. Even worse, another option is to "downgrade to Windows XP" on new systems. Fail.