I suspect what made companies exclude easter eggs was a sense that they were too big and "serious" for this sort of whimsical activity. And specifically for Mic

I suspect what made companies exclude easter eggs was a sense that they were too big and "serious" for this sort of whimsical activity. And specifically for Microsoft, a sense that they were now targeting the Enterprise marketTM and were above all this consumer-grade behaviour. Interestingly Google still has easter egg behaviour for several queries, e.g. askew[1], which fits well with their corporate brand. To be clear, an easter egg is only supposed to be a (pleasant) surprise to the consumer -- not a secret kept from the rest of the team, especially QA. You can and should absolutely test your easter eggs. Yes, Excel's increasingly elaborate easter eggs[2] would probably find it hard to get past security review these days. But to say that easter eggs are bad because security doesn't make sense. Especially when companies include undocumented features in software all the time -- e.g., typing '=rand()' into newer versions of MS Word produces some random text, probably a lorem ipsum generator-like feature. [1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=askew&oq=askew https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=askew&oq=ask... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGZfuwsvIFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGZfuwsvIFQ