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Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

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nikcub·

how about the flight simulator easter egg in Excel? that was cool

microsoft always included cool easter eggs in their products

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_produc...

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Not anymore. After the lawsuit about including the web browser with the system they are no longer allowed to include undocumented features in their software. (citation needed)

no it wasn't then. It was around 2000 or so and more related to (as i remember) two things - securing government and enterprise contracts and public perception related to viruses and security. I was there as an employee in Visual Studio and distinctly remember the admonition from Brian Valentine that there were to be NO easter eggs in Win2K and on. They couldn't credibly say that they were in control of the security of the platform with people hiding doom levels in Excel and (in the case of Visual Studio) working slot machines...

Working slot machines? Please tell me more...

visual studio 6.0 - help | about, then ctrl-shift while double clicking the visual studio logo. the code name for the project was... vegas

EDIT: wow this isn't even on wikipedia. i feel like i'm revealing a MS secret. :)

ye hence my past tense because I couldn't recall one from more recent products. that sounds like a reasonable reason why they don't do it anymore

Excel takes 154MB in disk... that's why!

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