That's a letter I received today:<p>This notification was generated for feedback item: <...> which you submitted at the Microsoft Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com) site.<p>Thank you for taking the time to report this problem. This problem was reported two years ago. In an effort to focus our resources on the most impactful problems, we are closing old Connect issues. If this problem is still important to you, please go to https://community.visualstudio.com and follow the instructions there to file a new report.
It reminds me of an old joke from the Windows95 era:<p>How many Microsoft engineers you need to change a light bulb?
None. Microsoft simply announces darkness the new standard.<p>* - (please don't take it seriously)
At some point, simply keeping track of these things is more overhead than it is worth. I don't work anywhere near the scale of Microsoft, but at some point, you just have to say, alright, we're not fixing this; it works completely different in version N+1 that you should have upgraded to years ago, and btw, we're actually on N+3 now, so we are not going to fix old, janky code that we already fixed.
Having been part of projects that grew large over time and are composed of too many components, I understand why this is done. It reaches a point where you can't go to each open issue and see whether it's still relevant in the context of all the new and different technical changes that would have gone in during that period.<p>That mail does seem to point to a place where users can report this afresh if it's still relevant. So, not a bad approach, to get these bug reports to hopefully in a more relevant and manageable state.
This fits into the picture with the development culture that was hinted on in these irc chats:<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/y6clspP.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/y6clspP.jpg</a>
Many other large companies do that.<p>Google did that with Android several times, and another poster mentions Apple does that too.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8803118" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8803118</a>
it's interesting to see that Microsoft is actively adopting Jamie Zawinski's CATD model[0].<p>0. <a href="https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html</a>