As I recall, Brian Valentine sent an email to the Windows division and basically said that easter eggs made the product look bad. Customers don't want to be patching their systems constantly (I was there circa 2000 so in the NT4/2000/XP era, so back when windows update was a website you visited, and the original NT4/2000 bug fix delivery mechanism was the service pack and various rollups) and then also hear it contained easter eggs for funsies.
Microsoft also licensed the source out to companies, governments, universities, etc and it wasn't a professional look. Easter eggs in games - that's fine. Easter eggs in your operating system, that licensees could see - not a good look when the previous product (NT4) didn't have a great stability reputation and Microsoft wanted to pursue businesses with new SKUs like Windows Enterprise, Datacenter, with features like clustering.
BV recognized programmers wanted to insert a little bit of credit so for Win2000 the easter egg replacement was either a link to a webpage (that listed the names of the Windows team members) or a rolling display of those members. Sorry I can't quite remember which it was... I think it was a link to a webpage to keep as much out of the OS as possible.
Remember this was around the time that Excel 97 had an easter egg flight simulator, Word 97 had a pinball game, and Windows NT 4 had one or two easter eggs maybe more (one was the opengl screensaver would 1% of the time draw a teapot at an intersection; the other was a scrolling list of windows team members that I don't remember how it was invoked. So due to this I'm 98% sure what he let into Win2000 was a webpage link). By now, the URL is probably long decayed.
As I recall, Brian Valentine sent an email to the Windows division and basically said that easter eggs made the product look bad. Customers don't want to be patching their systems constantly (I was there circa 2000 so in the NT4/2000/XP era, so back when windows update was a website you visited, and the original NT4/2000 bug fix delivery mechanism was the service pack and various rollups) and then also hear it contained easter eggs for funsies.
Microsoft also licensed the source out to companies, governments, universities, etc and it wasn't a professional look. Easter eggs in games - that's fine. Easter eggs in your operating system, that licensees could see - not a good look when the previous product (NT4) didn't have a great stability reputation and Microsoft wanted to pursue businesses with new SKUs like Windows Enterprise, Datacenter, with features like clustering.
BV recognized programmers wanted to insert a little bit of credit so for Win2000 the easter egg replacement was either a link to a webpage (that listed the names of the Windows team members) or a rolling display of those members. Sorry I can't quite remember which it was... I think it was a link to a webpage to keep as much out of the OS as possible.
Remember this was around the time that Excel 97 had an easter egg flight simulator, Word 97 had a pinball game, and Windows NT 4 had one or two easter eggs maybe more (one was the opengl screensaver would 1% of the time draw a teapot at an intersection; the other was a scrolling list of windows team members that I don't remember how it was invoked. So due to this I'm 98% sure what he let into Win2000 was a webpage link). By now, the URL is probably long decayed.