One of the reasons for the bloat of Microsoft products is its focus on backward compatibility. A huge number of applications manage Office through COM, and they all break down if MS refuses it.
Integration with COM was a huge pain when Microsoft customers first had to do this. Clients would be absolutely ugly if they had to rewrite all their applications in order to use a different integration method.
This, or they will simply stick to older versions of Microsoft software even after they get out of support. This will greatly slow down the treadmill, and MS does not want this.
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