Legacy Software Efficiency vs. Modern Software Bloat
Description
This meme uses the 'Swole Doge vs. Cheems' two-panel format to compare old and new communication software. On the left, a muscular, confident Doge represents the legacy instant messaging client ICQ, with its flower logo prominently displayed. The caption below boasts of its supposed ability to 'Find anyone on earth and send direct file transfers in 50 different chats on a 486 with 4 MB ram using a 14400 baud modem,' humorously exaggerating its efficiency on ancient hardware. On the right, a small, whimpering Shiba Inu (Cheems) represents the modern Microsoft Teams application, with its logo shown. Its caption reads, 'I ran out of memory while loading your username,' portraying it as weak and inefficient. The meme satirizes the common developer complaint about modern software bloat. While applications from the 90s like ICQ were built to be lightweight and run on resource-constrained systems, many contemporary apps, particularly those built with frameworks like Electron (which powers Teams), are notorious for high memory and CPU consumption, often failing at simple tasks despite running on vastly more powerful hardware
Comments
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The difference is that ICQ was written in C++ by people who had to manually manage every byte, whereas Teams is a web browser cosplaying as a desktop app that probably spins up a Kubernetes cluster to render an emoji
Turns out Moore’s Law didn’t double compute power - it just funds Teams’ weekly RAM buffet
The real irony is that ICQ's entire codebase was probably smaller than the node_modules folder of a single Teams emoji picker component, yet somehow it managed to implement presence detection without requiring a dedicated Kubernetes cluster
Ah yes, the eternal paradox: ICQ could handle global instant messaging on hardware that couldn't run a modern JavaScript framework's build process, while Teams needs 8GB just to contemplate rendering your profile picture. It's almost as if we've spent 30 years of Moore's Law gains on abstractions, Electron wrappers, and telemetry - truly a testament to our industry's commitment to making yesterday's impossible problems trivially solvable while making yesterday's trivial problems impossibly resource-intensive
ICQ was a thin native client over sockets; Teams is Chromium + Node with a few dozen services - and somehow OOMs while hydrating your displayName
ICQ fit presence and P2P file transfer through 14.4k on a 486; Teams OOMs rendering your initials - apparently performance now scales with the number of Chromium processes per screen
14.4k modem orchestrated global file relays; Teams OOMs on a username - behold scalable architecture's prodigious regression
What was it? Comment deleted
icq Comment deleted
100% true. Every time I wonder how MS managed to create such an unusable bullshit Comment deleted
I love the login loop that it sometimes jams into, and then you have to enable third party cookies for Skype for business and lync domains, then clear all cookies from your browser, and start again 🙃 Like, the issue was first reported on 2017, and they just haven't fixed it at all Comment deleted
There was another time, when I just launched it and it started update or smth and I got a call, somehow it caused my video drivers to blur most of the screen with rainbow hue and after that locked my resolution at 1280x720, I needed to reinstall drivers Comment deleted
Wow, that's impressively bad Comment deleted
MS fills with bullshit every software it touches. Same goes to Skype. It was a very smooth communication software until they purchased it. Comment deleted
That is used but hundreds of companies tho... such a paradox Comment deleted
It was made on top of SharePoint (channels, teams and chats are SharePoint sites or use SharePoint APIs) and OneDrive (the file transfer part) Also, technically, it's running inside Electro AND it's UI was made using Angular New teams (V2) uses React (or Solid?) for it's interface and Edge's backend for it's rendering instead of Electron Comment deleted
Fr, it once caused my windows crash, corrupting my opened files Comment deleted
Is the username thing referring to a specific bug? I've not heard of that one Comment deleted
I think that's a "generic" joke about electron. All that hello-world in gtk/qt vs electron where the last eats about 300mb of the storage and the same amount of RAM Comment deleted
Ah, yup, that's fair. Still annoys me that Microsoft bought Atom (as part of the github deal), which was the origin of Electron, and one of the only good apps in it, and then they killed it :c Comment deleted
BTW, Teams is Skype on heavy Electron steroids Comment deleted
yeah, I know this because older versions of teams show up as skype in pulseaudio control… they just forgot to change the branding there ig Comment deleted
Skype, or Skype for business? Or lync? Because they were all different protocols under the same names x_x Comment deleted
Both, I guess. The Skype Linux port was still running on QT, until MS developed the Electron version for Windows enough and then released skypeforlinux which is Electron bullshit too. Comment deleted
Overengineering YES Comment deleted
Yup. Anything they can do to boost that :c It sucks. I want a text editor to manage todo lists, and now I have to use vscode Comment deleted
Teams still doesn’t have forward messages (to be done in appropriate and easy fast way). Users have been requesting this feature for 4 years at least. Meanwhile MS: “haha, whatever lol” Comment deleted