Microsoft will soon retire its website for downloading free themes and wallpapers. Instead, the company will promote a themes section within the Microsoft Store.

I'm on the Microsoft campus this week for a training workshop on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Today, during our lunch break, we got to go to the Company Store and allowed to purchase up to ...

That longevity—plus Microsoft's total domination of personal computing in the pre-iPhone, pre-Android world—helped make its default wallpaper one of the most recognizable images on the planet.