I have done several customer engagements in past teams from conferences to very private executive engagements where I've been the 'technical guy'. Since most qu

I have done several customer engagements in past teams from conferences to very private executive engagements where I've been the 'technical guy'. Since most questions flying at me are factual, it is easy to respond with factual responses. But with any hard question which goes outside pure tech, I would deflect it some poor biz-dev/product manager who would have to weigh several things in his or her response - Microsoft's strategy, future plans (both disclosed and secret), competitors and their selling points, what this current customer expects to hear among a host of other things. It is a much harder job and I often came out looking like the 'technical guy who was a straight shooter, not like that other suit' though I had the much easier task. This isn't some Microsoft thing alone. If you parse through any large scale engagement from any big company, you'd almost always see this pattern. Go to any conference and walk up to a large company's booth. If you ask technical questions, you'll often get the engineer to respond. If you ask some roadmap/competitive positioning/touchy question, you'll get directed to someone else. This is usually because the engineer involved doesn't know the answer/strategy/market positioning/whatever. To say that one group is somehow more well-intentioned/honest than the other seems wrong.