I was happily hunting about the Microsoft knowledge base site for information on a particular icon when I ran across KB article 281923 entitled “Hair Color of the ‘Person’ Icon for a User Group Becomes Gray If the Group Contains More Than 500 Users.”

The information in KB281923 details a registry hack to change the hair color back to normal by modifying the 500 user limit to any number you like. That wasn’t really what interested me.

What interested me was… why would they choose to delineate a 500+ user group with gray hair? Does Microsoft assume that any user group with more than 500 members is “old?” Or that 500+ users in a single group would cause stress-related gray hair? I own more than a few of those that I blame on my nine-year-old!

To be honest, I can’t imagine that most people would even notice this change nor would they care. But it did give me a good chuckle when I imagined the conversations in the developers’ meeting that resulted in this particular notification method.