In my experience while I worked there (on Visual Studio and Chakra) it felt like all the major bad decisions were being made at the upper-levels of management - things like the original Windows 8 sandboxed XAML "Apps", the Surface RT, killing VB6 without giving users a clear exit strategy, the decision not to market Zune internationally, making Windows XP look like a toddler's Fischer-Price toy, or the Terri Schiavo-like treatment of Windows Phone - but conversely it's also where good decisions come from (Bash on Windows, Docker support, SQL Server for Linux).

Contrary to your point: none of the shareholders had any input on those decisions above (except possibly getting rid of Ballmer post-Nokia...). It's just management playing dice with ideas seemingly without much critical thinking - or at least transparency as to why they decided to press-ahead with a controversial decision.

My, I guess I wasn't pessimistic enough. I mean, a bunch of evil investors trying to squeeze money out of a company is one thing, but now you're telling me plain incompetence is enough?

I guess we still have a long way to go before we make software right.

Notice the good decisions came later than the bad decisions in the list.

I guess like Dumbledore says "In fact, being rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huge"

> It is controlled by its shareholders, not by its employees.

It is controlled by management, shareholders don't have any input, especially at this level of detail.

Employees I think NOW (in some divisions) have input, but it is still in pockets.

Ask yourself this: do you think Scott Hanselman happiness level with the "new Microsoft" is better/worse/unchanged?

NOTE: It's really interesting to see how much public perception has changed wrt Microsoft, in that a comment attacking Microsoft is downvoted! So obviously, they are making positive progress.

It's being downvoted because it is really mean spirited, in case it wasn't obvious to you. You know there are MS engineers reading this thread, and your comment is essentially shitting on them and saying that they don't have any pride in their work.

It's one thing to shit on management or whatever, but your comment reads at least in part as a very serious dig at the actual employees. And it's just a really shitty thing to say to someone.

I can see how it could be easily misinterpreted, but I think if you read what I said, I was pointing my finger at Microsoft the company.

But then again, if we refer back to the original article and assume the author is being mostly honest (I believe he is), then are employees working in support who disingenuously transfer people around to "more appropriate" support personnel in a system designed (by management, yes) to get people to give up beyond any criticism, because "it's just their job"? I think that's a valid question.

Point taken I am excessively rude, but good god how will anything get better with quasi-monopolies? My intent, to be honest, is to invoke a feeling of shame to employees who watch this happening and do nothing. I think there's even a famous saying to that effect.

Erm. This may be a nitpick, but managers are people and as such we have actual, real feelings.

Ironically, a good manager will generally have a pretty solid amount of empathy because that's key to being good at the job. So if it's not okay to crap on engineers (it's not) then it's also not okay to crap on managers.

NB: not affiliated with Microsoft. Edit: Freudian slip.

I actually wrote my poorly written wishlist for Satya partly in response to Scott Hanselman's post. The most important of these right now are probably patents. I have this submission on FAT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13896891