Ask Paul: June 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And welcome to a monster edition of Ask Paul with some great questions to help kick off the weekend a bit early.
Fit and finish
hastin asks:

Paul: Why is updating the loading circle so hard for Microsoft? I noticed that even on a clean install of 22H2, there's even more places where it seems they've only half-replaced the circling dots.

What you’re really asking here is why can’t Microsoft ever finish the job? This company---and the Windows group in particular---has a rich history of starting but not finishing things.

I’ve actually written about this extensively over the years and coincidentally came across something I had written called “In Praise of Finishing a Job” years ago while researching events for the Programming Windows series. I was going to paraphrase what I wrote, but I actually made the point well enough back in 2012:

“Microsoft culture has rewarded shipping a product or product version above all else, and if that product happens to be attached to some huge revenue stream, all the better. The problem is that no software products and services are perfect and bug-free. And the dark half of that Microsoft culture is that there’s little if any reward for those whose job it is to set things right.”

“In the old days, you could see this dichotomy most clearly in how Microsoft developed and then serviced Windows. The folks who created a new Windows version were heroes within the company and could do no wrong. But once that Windows version actually shipped---the process we all know as its release to manufacturing, or RTM---the code was unceremoniously handed off to the B-team, the folks responsible for servicing Windows. These folks weren’t heroes at all. They were almost non-existent as far as the rest of the company was concerned.”

This culture persists to this day. And you can see the evidence of that all over Windows 10 and Windows 11. The slow drip-drip of adding Control Panel functionality to Settings but never really getting rid of Control Panel, for example. Or, more recently, in Windows 11, the internal self-celebration of the new Start menu and Taskbar without any acknowledgment or caring that these new interfaces broke functionality that many millions of people were using. This is Microsoft at a high level: Favor the new over finishing the job. Every time Microsoft adds some pointless new feature to Windows 11 in a Dev build, I ask myself why it isn’t spending that amount of effort on fit and finish. But they never have. And they never will.

“There’s no real reward for tweaking an existing product, adding that missing feature, or fixing the tiny incomplete bits,” I wrote ten years ago. “If the past is any indication, work on Windows 8’s successor began months ago, and you have to think that the A-team that foisted Metro and the Start screen on us has moved right along to this next milestone and will have little to do with fixing the previous release. If ...