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> A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.

I wish this were true, but unfortunately, I've seen enough evidence otherwise to strongly disagree. MBAs weren't born evil, they were made that way in business school. The same corrupting process works on engineers and can happen outside of business school contexts (one common corrupting force is Hacker News comments). An MBA-brained engineer as a manager is orders of magnitude worse than a regular MBA.

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Which company would you say is the example(s) of the latter? Sounds like utopia I'd like to be a part of.
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Different sector, but I'd say Blackmagic Design seems to be run by people who actually use their own products and care about both product experience and engineering.

In the creative industry there is a bunch of these "boutique" companies that places great care on the final experience. Probably Blackmagic Design is no longer "boutique" to be fair, but seems they still got the culture right.

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Valve and the few sane startups / small/mid sized companies you can be lucky enough to end up in.

I was part of the transformation of a healthy mid size engineering led startup company that got taken over by MBAs and Indian employees and saw the whole lifecycle.

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They want to be Apple. Apple sells hardware, services, and takes a huge cut being a software store.

Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.

Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.

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> Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.

Considering that at this point most Microsoft OEMs are failing, Microsoft should just start building a lot of consumer hardware.

Apple makes more money selling consumer hardware than the entire PC hardware market combined. I'm exaggerating, but only a little. This would have been unimaginable in 1999.

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