This kind of deliberate but trivial breakage can't be an accident, and there's enought precedent ("let's screw with the VS/office interface today shall we"). So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else.
But I don't believe that 'correcting' a typographical convention is what this is directly about.
> So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else.
In larger teams and companies, changes move pretty slow through the design-development-QA pipeline. Maybe this change was made a year ago, and worked its way through the pipes only now?
But I don't believe that 'correcting' a typographical convention is what this is directly about.