I reckon Microsoft are being paid by computer chip manufacturers to make their applications UNnecessarily processor intnensive
As they say: "Never attribute to mallice that which can satisfactorily be explained by incompetence"
The windows API and codebase has been bogged down by two decades of backwards compatibility, new paradigms, and thousands of programmers, each with their own programming style.
I bet that there are a bazillion instances of "don't touch this or it would break, just slap another layer of crud on top" all across the microsoft product lines...