Raymond Chen has been at Microsoft for years and years. His blog - The Old New Thing - is definitely one of the best ones by a Microsoft employee. Raymond discusses many different topics, but in my opinion the most enlightening subject he discusses is Windows backwards-compatibility, and everything that encompasses. So many times, some weird behaviour in Windows can be explained by the need to maintain backwards compatibility.

I have a particular pet peeve with Windows, so I decided to submit it to Raymond through his Suggestion Box. Here’s what I submitted:

One of my pet peeves is keyboard shortcut inconsistencies in Windows. I’m sure it’s a “legacy” thing, but the one that gets my blood boiling every time is the CTRL-Backspace shortcut to delete the previously typed word. It works in about 70% of the programs I regularly use, but fails to work in a select few that really drive me crazy: Notepad and Excel top that list. Is that keyboard shortcut something that has to be implemented on a program by program basis, or is it something more subtle?

Since he gets so many suggestions, there’s a good chance he won’t be able to cover this. But, if anyone knows why this happens, it will be Raymond.