Comment by Jedd

FWIW, everything I've heard & read about what goes on inside Microsoft suggests that it's perfectly possible -- highly likely in fact -- that no one within the organisation has the same level of understanding of these problems as you do.

The silo nature of every product line, the competitiveness within and between teams (not Teams), the frequent rebuilding or reinventing of similar-but-never-quite-same fundamental components for different products ... also explains why even if someone within the organisation did understand all that was wrong, wouldn't be able to effect change.

Depressingly it may simply be an ineluctable effect of large organisations producing software.

For the past five years I worked with a vendor who sold a range of application & network optimisation, monitoring, reporting tools -- many of those were acquisitions -- and the work to properly integrate all those (by themselves, coherent) applications was clearly never going to be completed, despite claims and some efforts to do so.

Nowhere near on the scale of Microsoft, and certainly the problems and workarounds were understandable by every engineer and sales person in the organisation, but for whatever reasons - resourcing, prioritisation, technical, etc - it simply wasn't going to happen.

This year I've started working in a shop that uses the whole Atlassian suite (last exposure was with a few components only at a gig in 2011 - I haven't come into this role with high expectations).

It suffers similar (again, not to the same scale) problems. Some doubtless due to acquired products never really fully being integrated back into the mothership. Others are brought upon themselves -- notably the breathtakingly annoying feature disparities between SaaS and on-prem versions of the same product. As per your frustration arising from not being able to answer a simple question with a simple answer, their forums are full of people asking very simple how-to questions ... and then needing to get used to disappointment.