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Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?


A dev on my team wrote the following Excel 2000 credits (it was a flying carpet-like game). Afaik that was around the time BillG put his foot down and mandated no new credits. Enterprise customers felt these credits were both a sign of wasted engineering time ("you could have fixed x bugs instead!" and wasted disk space. It's logical, but only partly true. Shipping software on CD means a very long stabilization phase. You couldn't really "fix more bugs" because every bug fix had a risk of introducing another one. That means some Office teams would literally complete their work a year before shipping. They'd sit around half-heartedly helping other teams. That's when someone would take time to write credits. These credits were often tightly-optimized C and assembly, taking very little space. The facts couldn't overcome the optics, so that was the end of fun Microsoft credits.


Not at MSFT but no. Easter Eggs aren’t worth the security risk of added code.

See ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative from the 2000s.




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