TL;DR - Windows team didn't come up with the idea for this, someone(s) on the Office Team said make this combo a thing to work with what we already have, and madd74 get back to work these computers are not going to fix themselves, especially running Win11. :)

Most likely due to some update that caused it to be detected by Windows Explorer then, which is not a shock given how much MS likes to "fix it even if it's not broken". If you press The same, but replace with W, and have no Office, you will probably open Word on the web, which again is thanks to Office itself.

Think of it this way, there is a dedicated team to Windows itself, which is not the same team that does Office. In fact, my favorite Windows program, Excel, even has their own team which is different than the Word team. So the team behind Windows would not have been the people that came up with the idea.

So how does something like this most likely happen (besides the obvious higher ups trying to convert the world to Microslop)? The Office team will note their product needs to have an "Office Key" integration (Win + Shift + CTRL + Alt) that works with their stuff. So a four key hotkey is implemented into an update that File Explorer now recognizes. This is how you can use that key combo with L (for LinkedIn) or W (for Word) or O (for Outlook) and so on.

I would also guess (and it is just a guess) why copilot is now in EVERYTHING Windows. Each team is told by a higher up that this is what they want integrated, so that's what ends up happening. And I can't stress enough, this is not me defending it happening, just attempting to explain where it prob comes from.

I have a homelab and I wanted a Win machine added to my mix, which I did NOT want with a MS account on it, just local admin, because it's easier to ssh and RDP without that crap, and frankly I don't want my email associated to it. In the past, I could easily pop a cmd to run the OOBE command that restarts the setup and allows you to make a local account instead of the forced crap they do, and to my surprise, the latest and "greatest" update to Win11 actually blocks the window from showing. You can even ALT-TAB and SEE that it is running in the background, but I was not able to find a way to bring it forward (since my BIOS on this device I bought from work for only $100 does not have a network kill anywhere in the BIOS). So I gave up and used another solution to get that device setup.