Microsoft doesn't regard new graduates and industry experts interchangable. When I was hired, I had about 10 years of professional software development experience, especially in low-level areas (such as firewall software, data transfer protocol design, DOS-based GUI libraries, terminal emulation and so forth). I had good amount of operating system architecture knowledge too. I probably didn't have the fresh mind and well-formed education of a new graduate but I think I compensated that with the experience pretty much okay.