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Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does.

“We are the smartest developers in the world” I’m told used to be something you heard on campus, presumably during the recruiting process, and in the board room. But if the Justice department comes knocking, they turn into Steve Urkel.

You can’t have it both ways, and they “accidentally” break too many things that earn them millions of dollars. It’s not stupidity, it might not be malice, but if not malice then thoughtlessness or arrogance.




> Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does.

Not to say that they don't play dirty, but this isn't actually a contradiction. When you hire 100k workers, you're going to have the smartest developers in the world AND the Urkels.

And odds are the smart developers aren't being put to work on the login page.


First of all, Urkel is actually a genius, so it doesn't fit.

Second, if you know you have better and worse programmers you either control the work of the latter or you don't ket them work at your entry.

Nobody sees the work of your smart programmers if nobody could login.

So either MS is a lot dumber than I thought or they just don't care because they no most people can't or don't want replace MS software.


Peer pressure, oversight and processes are supposed to prevent a group of people from becoming more than the sum of their worst parts. Microsoft has always found a way to become the sum of the worst instead of the average or the intersection. They only stopped outwardly projecting that behavior for a while after the EU dropped sanctions on their asses. But that was four rounds of promotions ago so that’s all forgotten now.


> And odds are the smart developers aren't being put to work on the login page.

This would be a standard testing procedure, not really about developer being smart. Large organizations cannot depend upon individual heroics.


Someone created a story “for the new release of teams a minimum browser compatibility test is required”

The dev who picked it up got a list of supported user agents and decided that they’ll simply do a string match and didn’t think it through as it’s easier than implementing feature detection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...




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