I agree that the default was wrong in Windows Vista. I disagree that an icon would've been OK -- as Joel Spolsky pointed out, he had no idea what the icon would do. That's why he opened the fly-out menu, and that's why a lot of users opened the fly-out menu. Where they got confused.

I just found it frustrating that the tech press echo chamber ganged up on the fly-out menu, when that wasn't even the problem. The fact that Microsoft eliminated the complaints with just one button in Windows 7 shows exactly where the actual problem was.