"Steven Sinofsky recounts that Office 97’s growing feature set attracted sustained “bloatware” criticism and turned software bloat into a persistent product-management problem for the Microsoft Office team."
Sinofsky, who worked on Microsoft Office, describes firsthand how press criticism of Office 97’s scale and roughly 4,500 commands made bloat a recurring issue with customers, sales, executives, and the press, while noting that the term “bloatware” itself predated Office 97.
View Source