It's not that surprising, it's just different priorities. If a company would prioritize "Let's build a featureful note-taking app", they'll also get it done. But there's usually a lot of different priorities that are higher than building yet another app for the platform.

OneNote is a pretty decent note taking app.

Although I agree with your observation wholeheartedly, it should be obvious that shipping something at Microsoft is way more involved than shipping a hobby project. Just security and privacy compliance is half the work.

That Microsoft is just not good at building consumer-facing software in general is hard to deny though.

> It genuinely astounds me that as a solo dev he can make such a featureful app

It's a very generic webstack-app, build on 3rd-party-components. It's quite easy doing something on this level these days for an experienced developer.

> yet Microsoft the company has been failing hard in this realm for the last decade.

Did they? They are a company, so they have a different aim than a solo dev doing some hobby-project, or whatever this is. But quality-wise, their other apps build on webstack are not worse than this. It's more that they are old, with old apps, and they seem to have some internal struggles finding their way. Which is probably why they went back and forth with OneNote, and why it sucks so hard at certain parts.