Why are applications, on average, increasingly requiring more storage space?
In: 46
Because they don’t have to optimize as much any longer.
You can draw an analogy with how people/organizations budget as their resources get larger.
If you’re a starving college student, you know where every dollar is going. You are trying to get the most out of every single dollar that you spend, because you have so few resources that you can’t afford to waste any. Meanwhile, millions of dollars can go missing from the Pentagon’s budget without anyone knowing where they went.
Same thing with storage: In the earlier days of computers, we were limited to 1.4 MB for a floppy disk (or even less, in the 80s). If you couldn’t get a particular file below that threshold, you couldn’t distribute it through the only widely available method for transferring files. So developers had to work hard to make sure all of the individual files could fit onto a disk if they wanted to sell it. And when all of your individual components are forced to optimize, your program ends up optimized as well.
With the advent of CDs and especially DVDs, this restriction became massively loosened. And now that we mostly transfer files over the Internet and have hard disks measured in terabytes, there’s even less incentive for developers to spend time optimizing their code.
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