“Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts/Microsoft is toeing the line in Trump’s America” (The Verge, December 4, 2025):
Microsoft has been publishing data about the gender, race, and ethnic breakdown of its employees for more than a decade. Since 2019 it’s been publishing a full diversity and inclusion report annually, and at the same time made reporting on diversity a requirement for employee performance reviews. Now it’s scrapping its diversity report and dropping diversity and inclusion as a companywide core priority for performance reviews, just months after President Donald Trump issued an executive order to try and eradicate workforce diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
… employees no longer have to submit exactly what they did to improve security and diversity and what they plan to do in the future. … replaced with a simplified form that asks employees to reflect on the results they delivered and how they achieved them, and any recent setbacks and goals for the future. … In HR documentation, the company doesn’t even use the word “diversity” anymore, opting for just “inclusion” instead.
Also on December 4, 2025, pictures of my Windows 11 login screen:
Microsoft knows that I have chosen to use the Windows operating system and it reminds me about “the extraordinary women who have made a positive impact on the modern world.”
Who are the extraordinary women who built Microsoft Windows? I asked ChatGPT, “Who were the most important programmers of Microsoft Windows operating system that are identifiable by name?” and received the following answer:
- Tim Paterson, wrote original QDOS/MS-DOS
- Mark Zbikowski, designed MZ executable format
- Dave Cutler, lead architect Windows NT
- Lou Perazzoli, NT memory manager author
- Mark Lucovsky, NT kernel/I-O subsystem
- Rob Short, core NT kernel engineer
- Jim Horne, NT cache manager author
- Tom Miller, original NT kernel team
- Darryl Havens, original NT kernel team
- Steve Wood, original NT kernel team
- Ralph Lipe, Win32 input/driver stack
- Ken Reneris, GDI graphics subsystem
- Philip Fortier, early USER window manager
- Bob Day, GDI and USER components
- Raymond Chen, Win32 compatibility steward
- David Thompson, Windows 95 lead architect
- Brad Silverberg, Windows 95 project leader
- Jim Allchin, merged 95/NT codebases
- Mark Russinovich, modern kernel authority
- Dave Plummer, wrote Task Manager/Pinball
What do the people behind Microsoft Windows know about “extraordinary women” that the typical user doesn’t know? How did Microsoft become an expert on this subject? Will an extraordinary woman figure out a way for Windows 11 to run smoothly in less than 128 GB of RAM? Will an extraordinary woman figure out a way for Windows 11 to delete a file from the C: drive (M.2 SSD) without waiting for spin-up of the D: drive (HDD)?