Comment by gtowey
11 days ago
Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really.
They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together.
Who else can offer that?
For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.
Yes, that's the thing. I see the same. Every time we had to move from a third party product to a MS one we always had to limit what we wanted to do because the MS solution was far less capable and if we asked about it we'd just get stupid answers like "why do you want to do that, we don't work that way".
But they push it through the CTO with really good initial pricing, then when you're hooked they screw you on the next contract negotiation.
The old saying is: "Microsoft is much better at talking to your boss than you are". Which still rings true IMO.