What actually still constantly boggles me is the tooling for Windows.

There are so many things that would just need a better tool shipping with the OS to be fine, but are neglected (say: the event log (slow as hell and not nearly as comfortable as `less`. 'nuff said), the services dialog (still looks like in Win95, still can't auto-refresh, still has no useful search), notepad, PS ISE, the `scheduled tasks` dialog (still confusing as hell), even the effing task manager). Then there are tools MS actually owns (cf. Sysinternals) but refuses to distribute with Windows. And then, there are the new shiny things that get implemented to the point where they just barely work, and are never touched again (like the new terminal windows and workspaces in Win10).

I mean - especially the workspaces! Just give them to an intern and tell them to do the obvious improvements. They could be great, but they are still cumbersome.

The task manager has gotten a lot of work. I massively prefer many of the old Windows-style control panel items like services, add/remove programs, networking dialogs, etc. I will give you that scheduled tasks is confusing and the event log (which is fast enough for me) isn't super comfortable.

Microsoft doesn't want to distribute more tools with Windows (like sysinternals) because they'll have ship them forever. They should, however, put them in the store.

It feels like a lot of the new features are half-baked. They have tried to go to a rapid release model which should mean continuous improvement but I don't think they're quite comfortable with that. It's like the worst of both worlds right now -- slow fixes but lots of churn.

I get that MS isn't just twiddling their thumbs and that there are tradeoffs to be considered. It's just that from the outside, it looks like they're not really considering changing anything.

Also, I too can see that there is work that has gone into the task manager. It's still nowhere near where it should be, though. Personally, I'd switch to ProcessExplorer on any machine in a heartbeat, exept that I can't, because it's not bundled, and some businesses are very paranoid on software that has to be installed additionally. Note: I'm not saying it should be the default, but it should be there.

If the thing that's holding such changes back is the release model, then perhaps this reorg might change some things? Though, I somehow doubt that was the issue here...

That's my impression too:

Whoever is working on the kernel, the driver subsystem, etc, and whoever is working on CLR stuff, can stay. Everyone else is fired.

The problem is management and organizational priorities rather than the developers themselves. Microsoft was clearly able to give users what they want in the past (Windows 7) but that's clearly not the direction they're going.