Microsoft is a $2T company, I feel like they could afford to do it right.
That aside, they also have lots of products and teams and some have more budget and resources than others.
Saving some memory usage in teams for more than double the development costs, is probably an unattractive position for that team. It also makes it hard to keep features consistent across platforms (as it is, teams struggles with that!)
For example... Gamestop's market cap did this recently - https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/marke... - the company doesn't suddenly have more money to spend on projects.
Microsoft generates more money than they know what to do with so they return large amounts in dividends and probably stock buybacks (I haven't checked for MSFT specifically, but it's all the rage these days.)
That's essentially the opposite of what GME did.
- DOS 4.0
- Microsoft Bob
- Windows ME
- Windows Vista
- JScript
- MSJVM
- Zune
- Eliminating all/most easter eggs
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2612971/microsoft-s-13-wor...
You can make many, many mistakes as a giant company, so long as they're not fatal. ;-)