Here's a source for my claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302174 (I'd heard the story in person from S

Here's a source for my claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302174 (I'd heard the story in person from Snover years before that, so it definitely wasn't just sour grapes from somebody about to leave the company.) I can totally believe that MS had a culture where making improvements to cmd.exe was impossible to justify, but that doesn't actually mean that a greenfield project in the same space would be considered promo-worthy either. It seems more likely that everything in that space was viewed as career suicide and you needed to be working on Internet stuff, just like at today's bigco anything except AI will have the same problem.