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Alas for the easter eggs...

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Remember back when Microsoft apps had cool easter eggs?  Easter eggs were always a fun way for the development team to leave their mark on history.  Maybe your favorite feature got cut, but hey, your name was there in lights for all to see!

 

Leading up the release of Windows 2000, Microsoft starting getting a lot more serious about selling servers into the government and large enterprise markets.  These guys saw NT 4 as the first really credible enterprise-class product from MS, and were evaluating Win2k to see how things were progressing.

 

The story, as I recall it, is that one of these customers had some strong words for our easter eggs, suggesting that any company that could let such things frivolous things into their products wasn’t doing a very good software engineering job, and thus couldn’t be trusted to run an enterprise-scale business.

 

The argument never made much sense to me.  Easter eggs, at least on teams I worked on, were never anywhere near critical-path code.  And they often seem to have been pretty well tested by every member of the product team who wanted to verify their name showed up.  Maybe there’s some story I don’t know about how an Easter egg caused a perf hit, or crash or something (I bet if such a story existed, Raymond would know it.).  In any event, it seemed like we one day got this email that said “no more Easter eggs ever again”, and that was pretty much the end of it.

 

Too bad, I always enjoyed the creativity and humor behind these little gems.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Not including the backdoors and other nasties like profanity that have been included in products in the past.

    If an SDE or whoever wants to be mr.fancy pants they can do so in theyre own time but not on a live product unless its part of the spec. They could always apply to the games BU or consider a career in the Solitare team.

    Its an issue of trust and the SDE abused that trust by including something not designed in.

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Im curious, how does one "Evangelist" easter eggs.

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    I think that shows a failure of the process. What CMM level are you again :D I would certinally reevaluate that.

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    The inovation of the industry came from the imagination of the unconventional. By cramming these free-thinkers into coporate-world conventionality we're stifling the very creativity that got us this far...in my opinion.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Bingo Gee. They can search for 'em, find 'em, and root 'em out ... but they can't write 'em.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Of course I'm not talking about back doors and security holes, I'm talking about classic easter eggs, like the one I linked to in Excel, or this one from the mature VAX/VMS system: http://www.eeggs.com/items/25011.html. The open source crown enjoys these too, http://www.eeggs.com/items/36008.html.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Yeah great, let them do that on theyre own time, if they want food in theyre mouth, they dont do it, simple. Welcome to corporate americASS.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Easter eggs

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    I was quite please when a client recently asked me to put in an Easter Egg. Pleased enough that I'll probably spend an hour or two of my own time some weekend to throw something in.

    They also asked me to put in a TPS Report which I gladly did. It must be printed out and filed daily.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Internet Explorer still has one from the old browser wars...As most people know, typeing "about:blank" opens a blank page in Internet Explorer. Typing "about:mozilla" opens up a blue screen...a reference to Netscape's browser which had a tendency to suffer from BSOD. Typing "about:mozilla" in a Netscape browser is another classic easter egg...

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    There are still easter eggs on the Microsoft website. I know, because I put one there.

    One of these pages reads: "Last updated: 18 February 2004" at the bottom.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Your fired.

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    j-walkblog

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2004
    Not really.

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2004
    PanopticonCentral

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    well im happy to see that google still has humor and eggs

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2007
    PingBack from http://www.1nova.com/blog/?p=28

  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2007
    PingBack from http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/2007/06/13/image-hidden-in-windows-vista-dvd-hologram/

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2008
    PingBack from http://www.yeshotelrome.com/hotels-accommodation/?p=315

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2008
    Short answer, yes. Do a search for 'easter eggs' by me, Manip in the coffeehouse.