Honestly that series of blog posts that came across here semi-recently about what an utter disaster the Azure team is (through little fault of their own, mind you), combined with a lot of things I've read about the development behind Halo Infinite, have convinced me Microsoft is to avoided whenever possible. It's not even that they're too big to care, though that is an issue. It's that organizationally they are SO reliant on short-term contractors and junior devs plugging away with copilot, along with an ever more exhausted group of seniors who actually work for them but are continually disempowered, that I think it's safe to say anything they manage to ship is a minor miracle if it works at all, and it's certainly not going to have any guarantee at all of solid software engineering fundamentals.
And to be clear, this is not an issue with them using contractors, overseas or otherwise, or with their senior dev staff, or even with AI really. It's an issue with them organizationally being so incredibly penny-pinching, and so dedicated to shipping new shit versus fixing anything long term, constantly chasing new revenue and letting their existing offerings rot.
If a Microsoft product is good nowadays, it is literally a miracle.
