I agree with you. "Don't tell me what I can't do" is a philosophy that Microsoft's biggest customers pay for. Raymond replied down in the thread: "In this case

I agree with you. "Don't tell me what I can't do" is a philosophy that Microsoft's biggest customers pay for. Raymond replied down in the thread: "In this case, it was not for a specialized scenario but a program for a general audience." OK, in that case, we can taunt that developer, but it wasn't clear from the post itself which seems to ignore valid use cases. Think about a billing widget at Kinkos or vital metrics on a shared terminal in a factory. In my opinion, the correct response would have been "Sorry, we don't support that feature because it damages the user experience for home users. Also, we didn't think we could engineer a fully extensible sidebar in a meaningful way given our schedule. If you have an enterprise need, you can provide your own widget host and override the entire sidebar via group policy."