But how much of that stuff is actually needed, and how much is processor sucking prettiness?
I think people justifiably feel a bit peeved that word processors ran acceptably fast on a 286, and run acceptably fast on a modern multi-core many GHz machine, and yet the added functionality isn't that useful for most people.
Sure, for a program like Word, most users just know a small subset of the features. But they use many more of them because they rely on documents from people who know a different subset.
A useful analogy would be library functions. A new Python doesn't need to know its C Language Interface to use a library that relies upon it.
Word (and the other Office software) are amazing, vary powerful, etc. And the OS that these modern softwares run on are full of features.
And so software does do very much more than it used to do, and that's what people talk about when they talk about bloat.
I could install a minimal Arch, with JWM, and Abiword, and run everything from RAM and get blazing fast operation. But it is odd that modern software, even though it's so feature rich, is also so slow.
It's hard to say that Word is slow "performing x" when the alternative in many cases is not "performing x" at all.
Put another way, even if I never embed spreadsheets in my documents, if Abiword cannot deal with the embeded Excel spreadsheet that my client sends me, then Word's ability to deal with it is not bloat.
And if my alternative to editing the client's input numbers directly in the Word document she sent is to deal with a PDF and manipulate dumb text manually, then Word isn't running slowly.
"and yet the added functionality isn't that useful for most people."
Well, if the abillity to spell check as you type, see the formatting of the document as you work with the actual fonts et al, embed images and graphs etc isn't "that useful" to them, then they can always run something like WordPad or Notepad++.
I think people justifiably feel a bit peeved that word processors ran acceptably fast on a 286, and run acceptably fast on a modern multi-core many GHz machine, and yet the added functionality isn't that useful for most people.