> Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics; it is true of pretty much everything from Microsoft. From UIs, to development frameworks, to tools, to shells and even APIs. Back then, having "no taste" was totally fine because people communicated far less.

I think that the main problem is the MS has always tried to make things appealing to a certain crowd known as "VB developers", "drag and drop developers", etc.

I've heard too many times "You can do this with almost no code" with our cool new "Microsoft Foundation For Next Big Bullsh Blah Blah". And this is presented as a good practice. And the whole army of evangelists starts touting and praising the next BS framework. People start adopting it, other people start building other things on top of it, until everyone realizes it's BS and such practices, proclaiming "you'll write less code" lead to a pile of bad design decisions that you will later deeply regret.