Well, let’s take a step back.

Back in October 2003, when Vista was still Longhorn, the UX group of Microsoft released a paper called Application Archetypes (now only available in the Internet Archive).

It’s a solid piece of work. The User Experience group realised that there was no one-size-fits-all UI or experience for desktop applications, and so they clustered them in order to design interfaces – and provide tools to create smarter interfaces – for each.

Matt Webb, S&W, posted 2006-09-21 (talks on 2006-09-03, 2006-09-17)