I don't have very much forgiveness, perhaps only for those junior engineers tending the beast they grew, and which now has indigestion. No-doubt there are all the usual machinations of large corporations at work. Tech companies are no better (in some ways worse) than "normal" companies, because of the invisible complexity of software. Brooks, Ousterhout, and Stroustrup were not fools. But MS run a service, they get freedom to choose how it is engineered internally so long as it continues to present a service interface to the users/client apps/other internal and external services. This is an incredible level of freedom to choose what you engineer for. MS always had the ambition to serve the world with this service. It doesn't seem like they engineered accordingly. It's easy to knock them, but I think they must have made some significant wrong choices.

I'll spare readers the full anecdote, but I worked for the company running the largest mail service in the southern hemisphere, and at the same time a few of the large mail services in the northern hemisphere in the 1990s. We met with the Exchange team who wanted us to adopt their product. Where we could run a given service on 2-3 servers, Exchange sized by MS required 300 of them for just 1 of our countries. Fortunately our cash constraints prevented us going down that road. They offered the license for free and exerted pressure on the C-level, as you can imagine there were heated conversations and some choice language between mgmt and engineering on this topic.