Comment by bob1029

Microsoft gets a lot less difficult to reason about when we start to think of it as a statistical mean of human nature rather than the mind of one arbitrary evil bastard. They have 228k employees. The CEO has virtually zero direct influence on the end work product of any team.

Any organization this large is going to have approximately the same level of dysfunction overall. But, there are almost always parts of these organizations where specific leaders have managed to carve out a fiefdom and provide some degree of actual value to the customer. In the case of Microsoft, examples of these would be things like .NET, C#, Visual Studio [Code], MSSQL, Xbox.

Windows, Azure & AI are where most of the rot exists at Microsoft. Office is a wash - I am not a huge fan of what has happened to my Outlook install over the years, but Teams has dramatically stabilized since the covid days. Throwing away the rest of the apple because of a few blemishes is a really wasteful strategy.