It’s not a fundamental part of the OS, it’s a feature they pushed 12 years ago that never ever got any traction. User apathy towards Dashboard has been used as

It’s not a fundamental part of the OS, it’s a feature they pushed 12 years ago that never ever got any traction. User apathy towards Dashboard has been used as a darkly humorous but sad metaphor both inside and outside the company for many years now. Continuing to maintain things that have hardly any user adoption would be crazy. Better to take it out then leave it in as an attack surface and something that no engineer would ever want to work on. Many many more people know about Dashboard through jokes about how nobody ever uses Dashboard, than there are people who actually use Dashboard. Similarly, someday MS will remove live tiles from the start menu. It’s inevitable, but clearly internal politics are keeping the feature around. Guaranteed that 99% of humanity will rejoice when it happens, but equally guaranteed that someone on HN will express how appalled they are that a company as big as MS didn’t choose to keep the feature alive for the sake of the handful of people who liked it.