At the beginning of my career, sometime around 1999 or 2000, I was at Microsoft with our team because we were trying to integrate our product with this absolute piece of junk called Microsoft Biztalk.

It simply didn’t work. I complained about it and was eventually hauled into a room with some MS PMs who told me in no uncertain terms that indeed, Biztalk didn’t work and it was essentially garbage that no one, including us, should ever use. Just pretend you’re doing something and when the week is up, go home. Tell everyone you’ve integrated with Biztalk. It won’t matter.

I work for Microsoft/Azure and my incentives are (roughly in descending order): minimize large/long outages, ship lots of stuff (with some concern for customer utility, but not too much), don't get yelled at for missing mandated work (security, compliance, etc.) I'd love to improve product quality, but incentives for that are negative. We're running a tight ship, and every second I spend on quality is a second I don't spend on the priorities above. Since there isn't any slack in the system, that means my performance assessment will drop, which I obviously don't want. Multiply that by 200k employees, and you get the current state of quality across the whole product portfolio.

Because the products have become terrible, and they keep using more AI to solve it when AI is the problem with Microsoft. Microsoft execs are only riding Azure success, rest of the orgs are completely useless.

Microsoft used to be well-known for eating its own dogfood. I wonder what happened

To fix the Koolaid you need people that haven't drunk it.