Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Not surprising. There's always been some strong territorial elements in their culture.

Many years ago, I want to say in the gap between Win7 and the start of Win8 (the last multi-month "milestone quality" for the Windows org) a senior colleague made a bunch of quality of life updates to Notepad. I've forgotten the specifics, but things in the same idea as a proper undo stack, better find/replace, some keyboard shortcuts, and so on.

The version I was testing was quite nice, but the notepad owners caught wind of it and for whatever reason made the developer revert their change. At the time, maybe there was a stated reason like "our customers automate notepad and this could break their scripts", who knows (I didn't and don't), but it left a poor taste in everyone's mouth.

I wonder how that engineer feels about Microsoft finally implementing most of their ideas a decade later in Win11.

Occasionally these efforts get turned into PowerToys (I knew of an internal tool that was basically FancyZones many years before that was added to the suite), but I imagine many more are simply killed off and their authors punished or demotivated.

PowerShell is great, period.

Microsoft should acknowledge that PowerShell 7 built on .NET Core needs to be the default with Windows 11 and Windows Server.

That is the greatest PowerShell failure by Microsoft, why build a new PowerShell and then not make it the default.

Yes, i know there are issues surrounding support for .NET Core vs. Windows. I hope that Microsoft will come around and fix this problem in the near future.

Demoted him and yet it still exists? Personally not a fan of it. It’s not intuitive, but maybe it is if your a windows guy. But being a Linux guy, nothing about it is familiar to a shell experience.

Misleading title. In the article he insinuates that it was because it was an un-approved side project he was doing on company time. That context is important.

Now the PowerShell idea wins big. Really hope MS spend some budget to make it faster. Using the mighty shell with such typing latency don't quite make sense.