The fundamental problem at Microsoft is that building your career is a better (more lucrative) use of your time than building your product. You can be successful there without ever making a successful product. Microsoft acquired my startup and I spent 2 years there wondering what the hell was going on until I came to that realization.
Yup. You get the behavior you incent, and my impression is that the incentives to play politics at Microsoft are far more pervasive nowadays than the incentives to build good product. In fact, one of the biggest incentives to build good product seems to be the additional leverage it gives you politically...
