Hi, I hope you are doing good. From my personal experience, complaining about your manager to skip level manager is called Career Suicide.

There is nothing good that can come out of it,, except getting fired.

It is, but “Microsoft runs on trust” they say. They also say the CEO’s inbox is always open, actually the CEO himself says it in the yearly mandatory training video on business conduct. So it should be safe, in theory, to openly speak out in the best interest of the customers, no? Rhetorical question :)

Don't believe everything people say. Watch what they do.

By the way, are you not worried about NDAs and such?

Yes, there is how things are said to work, and how they actually work.

I feel like emailing the CEO in this case is just a no-op, the inbox is gatekeeped by his staff and very unlikely he saw your email.

That said, “inbox always open” means you should come with a problem AND a very well detailed solution. But question becomes if you had a detailed solution that was good, why wasn’t it ran up the org chart with buy in and why did it have to skip to the top.

The answer is “intricate politics and misplaced personal interests.”

But that's part of a great solution... it sounds like you might have had a good technical solution, but that's only half the solution in enterprise. If your technical solution requires another team to completely retool, its not a great solution overall.

it is not. the real world says one thing and does another.

here is how real world tech companies actually function: https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/