That's actually a hilarious example (in the "hilariously wrong" sense), because Jeffrey Snover had to accept a demotion to make PowerShell. He was told it was a useless project, not fit for someone at his level to work on, and bumped down a level when he persisted.

Interesting, because a Windows kernel hacker told it differently [0]:

These junior developers also have a tendency to make improvements to the system by implementing brand-new features instead of improving old ones. Look at recent Microsoft releases: we don't fix old features, but accrete new ones. New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones.

(That's literally the explanation for PowerShell. Many of us wanted to improve cmd.exe, but couldn't.)

[0] https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-...

Here's a source for my claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302174

(I'd heard the story in person from Snover years before that, so it definitely wasn't just sour grapes from somebody about to leave the company.)

I can totally believe that MS had a culture where making improvements to cmd.exe was impossible to justify, but that doesn't actually mean that a greenfield project in the same space would be considered promo-worthy either. It seems more likely that everything in that space was viewed as career suicide and you needed to be working on Internet stuff, just like at today's bigco anything except AI will have the same problem.

But then he got a promotion. So it was a calculated bet that paid off.

Wouldn't it be more likely that maintaining backwards compatibility (an important Windows trait, after all) while also implementing all of Powershell would be a considerably more difficult task than just making a new scripting environment?

yes, too much to ask for a multi-trillion company, especially that this company was until recently well known for maintaining crazy level of backward compatibility

But… this is backwards compatibility. The command prompt is backwards compatible. Sometimes the best way to ensure that is to preserve in amber and replace.

cmd.exe is a terminal emulator and PowerShell is a fully-formed scripting language (that Windows desperately needed). This analogy doesn't work the way you think it does.

> cmd.exe is a terminal emulator

Isn't Windows Console the (old) terminal emulator, with cmd.exe being just the command-line interpreter.

Yeah, conhost.exe is the old terminal emulator effectively (cmd.exe being a shell).

Before that, csrss.exe handled terminal emulation (which is why console windows weren't themable[1]).

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071231-00/?p=23...

cmd.exe can be used with shitload command line utilities and is a full blown scripting language just less powerful than Unix bash. The analogy works just fine.

This is mixing up cmd.exe which is the dos-like (but not dos) scripting interpreter, and conhost.exe which is the actual old terminal emulator/console that the kernel would spin up whenever you ran cmd.exe.