The hardware struggles to keep up with the bloat of Windows. My current PC has roughly a thousand times more compute power than my first DOS machine, boots in about 20x the time, and crashes maybe 10x as often. That's progress?
Well, my stuff starts up instantly and runs 24/7 for decades without crashing. The sources are more comment than code, so maintenance is easy.
Every Windows source module has a mandatory header, that's supposed to document the function, the author, and the revs. A typical module will have some gibberish name, and in the header section called "Module Function" the author generally fills in something like (I quote) "what it says".
Comments are rare and, when they do exist, are often useless or obscene.
That's because the Windows paradigm was kluged up in a hurry, and got worse from then on. Decades before Windows has cobbled up, real, solid, multiuser, bulletproof OSs had been running for years... literally running without crashing for years. DECs OSs used an event flag structure that made programs, basicly, into synchronous state machines; Windows uses an event-driven architecture that makes programs into asynchronus-logic hairballs.
The irony is that both Windows and the x86 architecture were designed entirely out of the mainstream of computing.
Well, that says it all. My products don't crash because I don't allow them to. But then, I'm not getting rich off forced upgrades like certain parties I could name. The only thing Windows does well is make money; that's all it was intended to do.
John