
Why no Easter Eggs? (2005) - markusmknsri
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/10/21/why-no-easter-eggs/
======
21
There was an article some time ago (also on HN) about a Linux command line
tool which had an easter egg on a particular date/time - it's output was
slightly different, and this broke some build scripts in another project, and
as you can imagine, it was hard to pin down.

Then the easter egg was removed and people were complaining that "it's takes
the fun, the human out" (as you can also see here)

But what if every command line tool had an easter egg at a particular
date/time? Then on every day of the year one of your tools would misbehave. Is
this really what we want? What if a safety critical process gets broken
because of this.

A recent example:

> We've noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30
> but work fine the rest of the day. They fail with the message "gimme gimme
> gimme" in stderr, which wasn't expected. Why are we getting this output?

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-
man...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-
gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030)

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
The obvious response to this is that there are two kinds of easter eggs.

The good kind doesn't do something one way a million times and then suddenly
produce a different result given the same input for no good reason like your
example date/time shenanigans.

Unpredictable behavior is called not being dependable. Not being dependable is
called untrustworthy. Software should always strive to be predictable,
dependable, and trustworthy.

But there have also been plenty of fun easter eggs in computing history that
didn't needlessly make the software less predictable. We don't need to also
throw out the baby.

~~~
throwaway37585
I think it depends on the context. In video games, easter eggs are mostly
fine. In utilities and tools, easter eggs are a potential source of harmful
behavior and security issues.

~~~
wink
Also you can do it in a non-destructive, non-random way. Take `apt` as an
example.

The easter egg is running it with an undocumented flag. The "error case" is
the same as mistyping a command. Sure, you could argue the return code is 0
when it should be != 0 but I'd argue a) if you're using the wrong flags it's
your fault and b) if you'd hit --help by chance it would also return 0.

------
afturner
> One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on
> your computer. Part of that means that there's absolutely NOTHING on your
> computer that isn't planned.

HA! That's incredibly amusing, considering, you know, Windows 10.

~~~
red75prime
Got any Easter eggs to show?

~~~
ben509
Does OneDrive count?

~~~
reitanqild
Candy Crush showing up on a business laptop running Windows Pro or what it is
called?

Same with login backgrounds for a game a newer wanted, again on my business
laptop running Windows Pro?

I often defend MS recently because some of the criticism is really over the
top.

Stupidity like that however should be publicized and questioned IMO.

------
lisper
> Once you've lost the trust of your customers, they're gone - they're going
> to find somewhere else to take their business.

Unless there is nowhere else.

One of the reasons I don't trust Microsoft is because they know perfectly well
that the above aphorism isn't true. They have an effective monopoly, even more
so in 2005 when this was written than now. They put a lot of effort into
developing and maintaining that monopoly, arguably more effort than they put
into building quality software. The idea that we're supposed to trust them
because market mechanisms will force them to be trustworthy, after they have
worked so hard to destroy those very mechanisms, is Kafkaesque.

~~~
ouid
Trustworthiness isn't the same thing as honesty. The goal of Microsoft is not
to be honest, it's to be trusted. The article is exactly what it claims to be.

~~~
lisper
> Trustworthiness isn't the same thing as honesty.

It's also not the same thing as being trusted. There are many entities in the
world that are trusted despite being neither honest nor trustworthy. (IMHO
Microsoft is one of them, but they are far from alone.)

> The goal of Microsoft is not to be honest, it's to be trusted.

Yes, I get that that is their goal. My point is that they are trying to
achieve that goal by being disingenuous and deceptive. (And they succeeded
spectacularly.)

------
jprissi
Yeah, the explanation sounds all good and professional but it deeply contrasts
with my Windows experiences.

While I can believe there are serious people working on this OS, I often
seriously get upset by all the crap Microsoft is putting in Windows. (There
was this time where it downloaded 'Candy Crush' on its own!?). I would prefer
a few easter-eggs instead.

Seriously Microsoft, please be coherent.

~~~
394549
> Seriously Microsoft, please be coherent.

This post is 13 years old. They may have been totally coherent in 2005 but
lost their way by 2018.

~~~
jprissi
You're right, I haven't seen it and thought it was more recent.

~~~
jprissi
In fact, the title got corrected from 2015 to 2005.

------
joekrill
I think it's important to note that this is explicitly about "the OS
division". Microsoft may have a company wide policy about this, I have no
idea. But I think there's a huge distinction between an OS having hidden code
and some higher level application or script having hidden code. The effects
are much different and much more dangerous at the OS level.

------
donatj
7+ years ago at a different company I had a tiny picture of my face encoded
and hidden deep within the bowels of our search system in a component you
should basically never have any reason to touch, along with kinda nasty and
obfuscated logic touching the global state of the application such that when
you went to `/easteregg` you got my face.

Someone must have found it because it suddenly disappeared from all the sites
that had it.

------
jdblair
I'm responsible for the Asteroids easter egg in the Sun x86 lights-out-
management. It is true that we sneaked it in using a rather unprofessional
manner (the build system would incorporate it iff the build happened on the
CIS build server). I'm older now, more experienced and probably wouldn't do
that again.

I also stuck an easter egg in the Cobalt NASRaQ, back in 1999. It was taken
out pretty fast (I had marked it in the code, "THERE IS AN EASTER EGG HERE,"
then checked it in). It did ship in the first version, though.

~~~
ben509
Much of that was also back before viruses and trojans were an every day
occurrence, before an unpatched computer on a network wasn't going to be owned
within an hour or so.

It was more fun back then, and we weren't the ones who ruined it.

------
fenwick67
There are two recent MS easter eggs I can think of:

1\. Clippy is hiding in the "school supplies" Office theme.

2\. The default user photo in Office 2010 was a silhouette of Bill Gates'
mugshot photo. This one is gone in the recent versions.

Both are just images though. No code was harmed in the making of these easter
eggs.

------
markusmknsri
I can understand the reasoning behind Microsoft's decision, and somewhat
agree, but ultimately I think something is lost when developers are kept from
leaving their mark on projects they spend a lot of time working with.

~~~
c12
I think a lot of developers leave their mark with documentation. I have myself
stumbled upon many easter-egg comments that have put a smile on my face.

~~~
egeozcan
I remember reading the manual of a handheld PC many years ago. It was very
professionally written and detailed. In the "updating" part though, there was
something like "At this point, the update has started and pressing the back
button continuously will only make you more angry". It had made my day.

------
tgb
I was under the impression that the military and maybe other branches of the
US government have "no East Egg" rules for software they use, and I expected
that to be the justification. Is this true? I found one document from a .mil
domain that specifies no Easter eggs [1] but I frankly don't know enough
context to know if this is actual policy that would apply to Windows.

[1]
[http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a495389.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a495389.pdf)

~~~
1996
would you mind pointing on which of the 133 pages is the rule?

I could not find it after a quick glance.

~~~
e1ven
I don't know if it is what tgb was referring to, but in section F-15, it says

c) No Malicious Code. Developer warrants that the software shall not contain
any code that does not support a software requirement and weakens the security
of the application, including computer viruses, worms, time bombs, back doors,
Trojan horses, Easter eggs, and all other forms of malicious code

~~~
1996
It's interesting they classify eastereggs with malicious code!

I'm glad I avoid doing business with the government.

------
spapas82
Well, Windows 3.1 back in 1993 definitely had easter eggs. I still after all
those years remember some of them (the perils of being a kid back then; these
things are just stuck in my memory):

\- Start minesweep and press enter; then write "xyzzy" (remember the magic
word from Zork) and press alt+enter. The top left pixel of the screen will
change color if there's a mine under your coursor.

\- For solitare, you could press ctrl+alt+shift when clicking on your stack of
cards to get them one by one instead of three by three.

\- Also for any program, if you click on the about Window you'd see the
windows flag ([http://logo-timeline.wikia.com/wiki/Windows](http://logo-
timeline.wikia.com/wiki/Windows)) and then if you clicked a couple of times at
a specific color (I don't remember exactly this) then you'd see some credits
along with a sketch of Bill Gates!

Those were great! So, "why so serious"?

------
Einstalbert
In older versions of our client, you could click on a portion of our logo five
times to get a small pop up image of our programming staff. It was an easter
egg, and cost next to nothing to implement.

I hope they change their minds someday.

~~~
freehunter
With Microsoft's track record on security and bug issues, I really hope they
don't change their minds. They should write exactly as much code as required
and not one line more.

~~~
admax88q
> They should write exactly as much code as required and not one line more.

They already clearly don't do that.

------
mchahn
I worked with the creator of the first easter egg, David Ramsey. In the early
80's he added a "Zebra Lady" to Mac Paint. It made a lot of press when it was
discovered.

------
ErikAugust
Eh, MS is so damn big that they can get a pass on no Easter Eggs in operating
systems. But I fully expect them to be games, etc. Have some fun, and respect
your roots.

------
Giho
It makes me think about the Linage OS April fools joke. Very annoying and
difficult to remove the notification that came with it.

~~~
scar45
I was unaware of it, but actually stumbled upon their apology[0] today.

[0] [https://lineageos.org/An-April-Apology/](https://lineageos.org/An-April-
Apology/)

------
yuhong
I remember this debacle:
[https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12816](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12816)
Notice the mention that "this was put in with great effort (to the extent of
stopping Trac notifications) by Matt himself".

~~~
folkhack
Which shows the maturity of WordPress developers as a whole. I'm still pretty
bent out of shape that this had basically a decade...

Source: Have been a WP developer for a long time (shoot me) and I've received
a FRANTIC call over this idiocy from a client in my early 20s. The user didn't
know how they produced it in the first place, was having troubles
communicating it to me because welcome to agency work, and I dropped
everything because I assumed that the site was potentially compromised (or
that the client was lying to me about "the computer virus on their website").

------
commandlinefan
> we filed a bug in the database ("Exchange POP3 server doesn't have an Easter
> Egg"), we had the PM write up a spec for it, the test lead developed test
> cases for it.

I'm not sure you fully grasped the concept here...

------
coleifer
The way I read it: we are taking your money (oh so much), we can't risk losing
your trust if you happen to have no sense of humor AND we want to preserve the
illusion that this is serious business.

------
verrecken
It's funny how Microsoft talks about "TrustWorthy Computing" and thinks
implementing Easter eggs could be malicious but a closed source os isn't ^^

------
daniel-levin
What I’m most curious about is which business and governments had access to
which Microsoft source code, circa 2005. Anyone care to enlighten me?

------
clubm8
I wonder how many "easter eggs" were planted by people on the NSA's payroll
pre-2005?

One of the lesser talked about things that was touched on in the Snowden docs
is that the NSA sometimes has agents within companies similar to how we
traditionally think of the CIA having "assets"

------
jadedhacker
They have a point, but count me nostalgic for the early days of early
technology. At a certain point things move from being homegrown and
individualized to industrial, dehumanized, and commodified. No one really
likes this process, but it's a choice our society has made. Of course, as a
socialist, I believe we can make different choices, but I digress.

------
bassman9000
Fun will be forbidden.

~~~
1996
It is sad. I disagree with that. Products needs to appeal to the end user.
Easter eggs have that gut appeal.

They are like google chnage of the main logo, but in a sneakier way: you will
not find them unless you look for them.

------
pfbtgom
This is 2005, not 2015.

~~~
doodpants
The '1' instead of a '0' is an easter egg.

------
mikec3010
Wonder how many "NSA eggs" have been planted in MS products over the years?
All it takes is one NSL.

