There's an unspoken rule in corporate America, colleges, etc. Laptops MUST be loaded down with terrible software, no exceptions. My last corporate laptop actually had the paid version of winzip in 2025, and it ran with a little tray icon that I couldn't disable or remove. That was in addition to all the other corporate crap I couldn't remove.

Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.

This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.

Our corporate linux machines have exactly the same monitoring software as Windows - even the servers. The performance is still not even remotely comparable. Could be the hooks are more performant on linux, could be the filesystem, maybe the tools are written more sanely... But loading apps, filesystem operations... Everything is still far faster on the linux dev instance. And I have half the ram allocated to that one.

The reason every developer makes their app open at startup, is because the Windows ecosystem doesn't have a good package manager. So every app needs to be its own package manager and check for updates on a timer. So they need to run all the time so they can run that timer.