Sounds like something I heard about GM last year. Their managers had no idea what the competition was like because they all "had" to drive their own cars.

I can imagine that this must be a hard thing to overcome in a car company. When you work for a car company, you want to be proud of your product so you want to buy from your company. However, most families have at most 2 cars, so you have very little incentive to buy and really understand a competitor's product.

I can see how in Microsoft you have the same forces at work. When building infrastructure or programming there is so steep of a learning curve regardless of what technology you choose that it is all but impossible to really understand all possible choices. Couple that with the inherent Microsoft desire to dogfood everything, and you get a lot of people understanding only the Microsoft way. Once you start going down that path, it's very easy to create your own mini-languages. It's all very incestuous, and not a good way to run a company. I think this is why Microsoft seems to have a hard time understanding Apple and Linux.

I don't actually think this is the case. More than half the people I met at Microsoft over the summer use iPhones (the rest generally had a Palm Pre or an Android phone; I met maybe 2-3 people with Windows Mobile), and many of them have Macbooks for their personal laptops. It was also quite common for people to use Google rather than Bing (though Softies are generally quite enthusiastic about Bing). Linux use probably is lower, simply because they use MS development tools to develop for MS platforms, but I certainly didn't get the impression that everyone at MS only uses MS products.

FWIW, I have heard from friends at Apple that using competitors' products there is frowned upon...

So not only were they less aware of what they were competing against, they had a false idea of what they were competing with.

A more non-dogfood arrangement is hard to imagine.

Additionally, he tells a story of someone bringing a speaker to an executive meeting who had deep knowledge of the Japanese auto market. They were allowed to speak, so long as they did not talk about Japanese autos or the Japanese auto industry.

I don't see MS as being in that sort of situation. However, as a very large successful organization (whose early genius builders have moved on), there are cultural perspectives that are hard to shake.