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Years ago I ran a business unit for NEC Semiconductors. I had a dedicated guy onsite at Microsoft (with a desk and everything) in order to work on WHQL driver support for a 3D graphics chip. It turned out to be a nightmare trying to get things sorted - due to MS obfuscation.
I remember that we'd finally gotten a hold of their implementing engineer and so I flew out to Redmond where we'd set up a meeting with him, our onsite engineer, and a software lead on our end. Arriving at the meeting, the MS engineer entered, closely followed (nearly led by the arm) by what I could only describe as a "political officer" (think Cold War Soviet Union). Every question we asked (mind you, we didn't need state secrets, just enough info to figure out why our implementation wasn't passing muster) was deferred to this political officer. The engineer wasn't allowed to speak without first whispering to the political officer what he was going to tell us. It was that insane.
Since then, it's become more and more obvious that the people that wrote the core operating system and the literal shit pile of software (that most of us don't use, don't need, don't want and can't really get rid of) are retired or have passed on.
Way too much crap is included that pertains to corporate IT management and pseudo security implementations, backwards compatibility to systems I haven't even heard of...
It is a sad sad reality of what design by committee becomes, especially when the real talent is no longer around and the new employees and management can barely decipher what's going on in the code, but are afraid (yes, literally afraid) to change anything because the OS bloat has become a veritable Jenga™ puzzle. So to make it look like they are accomplishing something, all the BS changes are made that "fix", "improve" and "modernize" things that weren't broken.
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