There's no way MS employees at all levels don't know. It only doesn't know organizationally. It's just the boring old incentive alignment problem.

There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.