What's completely inexplicable is why it took 23 years to do this.
Consider this:
(1) It's self-contained piece of UI code. It's not like this change will permeate effects throughout the OS.
(2) It's a few man days of work. Let's say that as a super-exaggerated-extreme estimate, it is still only a few months of work.
(3) Nobody was dependent on the current behavior.
(4) Everybody hated the current behavior. Programmers jumped through hoops like copying&pasting the strings into an editor, making a change, and pasting it back.
(5) They had at least 23 years to fix it (since at least Windows 3.1).
There are more plausible explanations about MH370 than there are about Microsoft's thinking here.
(1) It's self-contained piece of UI code. It's not like this change will permeate effects throughout the OS.
(2) It's a few man days of work. Let's say that as a super-exaggerated-extreme estimate, it is still only a few months of work.
(3) Nobody was dependent on the current behavior.
(4) Everybody hated the current behavior. Programmers jumped through hoops like copying&pasting the strings into an editor, making a change, and pasting it back.
(5) They had at least 23 years to fix it (since at least Windows 3.1).
There are more plausible explanations about MH370 than there are about Microsoft's thinking here.