Alas for the easter eggs...
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 removedAnonymous
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 removedAnonymous
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 eggsAnonymous
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-walkblogAnonymous
February 22, 2004
Not really.Anonymous
February 22, 2004
PanopticonCentralAnonymous
April 07, 2004
well im happy to see that google still has humor and eggsAnonymous
May 28, 2007
PingBack from http://www.1nova.com/blog/?p=28Anonymous
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=315Anonymous
June 02, 2008
Short answer, yes. Do a search for 'easter eggs' by me, Manip in the coffeehouse.