Re: Microsoft jus' gonna be Microsoft
"That was a common habit of theirs in the '90s."
Ack. back in the 90's I wrote a desktop trash-can application for Win 3.x. When '95 released, it had a similar trashcan built-in, that operated in a manner very similar to mine. There were other trash cans, though, each probably operating in a similar way. Mine used a directory to move all of the files into before emptying so you could un-delete them. I'm sure others did the same. You could also change icons with mine [the default was a toilet, which had green water if something was in it, blue otherwise].
But this is the world of competition in software, so it's no surprise, really. MS loves to employ "N.I.H." policies and "invent their own" instead of using someone else's thing, and will no doubt continue to "invent their own", even if they occasionally get sued for it [like dblspace/drvspace vs Stacker].