What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

One thing the article did not answer is “why?” I think I am missing something but why did Microsoft feel they needed to ship icons for other software vendors’ applications? Wouldn’t Lotus and Quicken want to ship their own icons with their software?

These were existing MS-DOS programmes that had already shipped. They wouldn't have shipped with a Windows icon as they were made before that Windows version existed (or at least shipped) and weren't even intended to run on that platform. Once Windows had shipped, and software vendors started making software for it, they will of course have included their own icons. The "why" is simply Microsoft wanting to make Windows play nice with users' existing software, and thus enhancing the user experience.

Part of the Windows 3.1 installer would search your hard drive for existing applications and add them to the Program Manager. Many of these were DOS applications that had no embedded icon resources. To keep them from all being default applications, they used this little DLL database of icons.

Microsoft wanted to make their new GUI shell for dos look good. There were no apps with icons so they put the most popular and some good stand ins so their new GUI file manager/launcher worked well.

The 'why' was answered in the first article of this series.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

The article links to earlier blog posts that explain the “why”.