Individual talent is irrelevant when you have a company culture that rewards the opposite of that. Any talented person working at Microsoft knows that they are dealing with structural problem that force MS products to be massive piles of shit. There isn't much an talented individual can do about that.
replyi agree with everything you said here except the last part.
replylots of nines means not having significant downtime. we passed 99.99% hours ago, and we're on the way to 99.9%
Lots of nines means they have SLAs of no significant downtime. It does not guarantee that the SLAs can never be missed, just that there will be consequences when it is missed. Lawyers and accountants and sales folks will sort out the compensation payments that come back to the customers and try to negotiate relationships back to a healthy state.
replyStuff happens and things break everywhere but right now at Microsoft they break badly and often, that points to actual issues.
replyAlmost certainly not the fault of individual people, it's a management failure of course
There are lots of talented amateurs. What separates professionals is standards, quality, teamwork, etc.
replyI agree there are many talented people at Microsoft, but I don’t see the professionalism in this incident.