In both cases the story seems like it can be summed up as "spec'd rewrites of major subsystems, and worry about implementations of how people actually use them

In both cases the story seems like it can be summed up as "spec'd rewrites of major subsystems, and worry about implementations of how people actually use them later". E.g. all the missing Win 8 basic Windows functionality, where the underlying system existed but no GUI had been written to expose it And how Windows Explorer search is still a cluster$&#@ that's regressed in functionality since XP (available operands to specify search params, scope, speed, etc).