>A large camp of software developers have genuinely hostile feelings towards Microsoft

which, besides hatred, manifests in malice, like Nightmare Eclipse. I wouldn't be surprised if this outage was an engineer leaving a parting gift, using a bug they probably knew of for years but management didn't allow them to fix.

Tellingly, I will not go to MS for UI stuff. When I have to anyway, I use their decades-old APIs. It is a canary with regards to microsoft, that they have no known champion for their UI stuff, no trusted face for their UI stuff; the company all just appears to coast along on "I assume someone is handling it?" The main microsoft employee I trust is Raymond Chen, they have no current generations of Raymond Chen / that we know of.

talent they can hire? large swaths of the company have been in a hiring freeze. they just sent 25% of the company voluntary severance offers.

I've been hearing that since 2002, at least.

Enterprises have been failed time and time again by poor MS products, but techies will steadfastly refuse to move off it, so the business has no option.

Jerk-offs can skim the profit of going big yesterday while the consequences affect everyone, but only in the future of yesterday. Who does such things, one might ask? Jerk-offs, off course. And PE too (likely not a disjoint set).

Was there ever a time when this was not true? M$ was always among top hated companies since 90s, arrogance, fuck-U to users all around, absolutely ignoring any standards larger than them, and famous 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' which was pathetic to watch for any engineer worth 2 cents.

Top notch user experience peak was Windows XP and every subsequent release was massively larger, clunkier and slower while requiring way more resources, was spying on the users more and more. Office has similar story, peak of usability was maybe 2007 with ribbon introduction (which still a lot of power users hated with passion since it was far from clean design, more seemingly designed by committee of marketing guys).

> every moving part would have a (small?) team of core maintainers, people that get paid well to know everything there is to know about something,

I work at a company with a few thousand employees in the Netherlands, and have been moved around a few teams in the last 7 years (not by choice, the team is nuked and I'm shuffled off elsewhere).

Technically, the product is supposed to have a "handover" to another team who can do the maintenance. What happens in practice is the person who worked on it gets saddled with maintaining it forever along with taking up the responsibilities of the newer work that comes along their way.

I've accumulated a string of such projects, including one that's used extensively by a few large companies, and the only person maintaining it is drumroll ... me, in whatever time I can spare for it.

Companies just don't want to compensate people to hang around and maintain a system, they want a consistent output of widgets that can be measured. Somehow our work culture is still stuck in factory worker mentality despite being well into the information revolution now.

I think STL was developed before Stephan T. Lavavej was born.