Customer retention is a pretty critical business function, but in my experience the people approving raises etc generally have a much tighter relationship with

Customer retention is a pretty critical business function, but in my experience the people approving raises etc generally have a much tighter relationship with the sales team. New revenue is a sales function, customer retention is a operations function. A big part of Steve Ballmer becoming CEO (and also his decline) was his sales first strategy. Windows 8 might have been a huge flop for Ballmer over the long-run (arguably why he was asked to resign), but I bet the people working on Windows 8 features saw their careers advance much faster than the equally talented people fixing driver bugs for Windows 7. And the Windows 7 driver team is probably going to think designing a new ticketing system for deleting accounts is beneath them and let that project roll downhill. And so on.