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.
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.