That’s fair, but even with that, it’s got to be easier to shove it into existing code. Especially if you’re trying to do it in a way that people don’t notice!
And actually, the Windows 10 start menu infamously had ads, too. So it can’t be that.
But this was four years ago! Actually it was released four years ago. This decision was almost certainly made before there were widespread code assistance AIs.
Tali Roth, the then product manager working on the core Windows user experience, including the Start menu, taskbar, and notifications, took up the question and talked about how building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.
WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!
If you have working code, why would you rewrite it from scratch? Refactor, sure. Overhaul, maybe. But why rewrite the whole thing?! You’re gaining nothing but unnecessary bugs.
I know all the joke answers. To justify a product manager’s salary, because Microsoft gonna Microsoft, whatever. I want to know the real reason. Why would you ever rewrite working code from scratch if you don’t have to?
Four years ago, Recall wasn’t a thing. Microsoft was caught as off-guard by the AI hype machine as the rest of us. So I doubt this was originally the reason.
Might be now, though.
The women who were presented to America had many more problems than their gender. I’m not discounting the reality that a woman has to be exceptional to be considered adequate by the electorate, but “America will not vote for a woman” is true until it’s not.
The mayor of New York City makes policies that affect more people than the governors of all but the twelve largest states. More than the smallest ten combined. His policies affect almost as many people as live in the rest of New York State.
Mamdani is about to become a massively powerful figure in American politics.
I’ve only ever had it work for me once or twice, and it was always near the very beginning of a project when I was only losing a few days or a week of working code at most. When I discover that I fundamentally misunderstood or misjudged a core assumption and everything needs to be reoriented. Never when I already had code in production.