So agreed. Execution long term depends on putting yourself in good technical positions.
It's enormously hard for companies to grapple with this. They not only need to be able to let technical knowledge workers go deep, they also ideally can check & review their teams too, help decide how well things are going.
- a ton of guys/ gals as reported/quoted by ms employees saying the company does dumb stuff they wouldn't be caught dead doing if they owned it
- the degree to which office politics (in fighting, specialists who didn't see the big picture, control battles etc) strangled ideas
It's not MS per se; it's endemic to large human organizations
Something to think about ...