Working in a large company (albeit much smaller than Microsoft) gave me an appreciation that there are many disparate voices in a company but it only takes one

Working in a large company (albeit much smaller than Microsoft) gave me an appreciation that there are many disparate voices in a company but it only takes one to sour a relationship. So then you have situations where one department is doing their job by trying to engage with the Linux community while another is doing their job by closing things off. Legal requirements and culture can make it hard for some of those voices to change course. In companies like these I see the main role of the executives being to marshall the voices in a shared direction, vision and understanding. A consequence of this is that an unintentional mis-step by someone of relatively low seniority can be seen as intentional strategy from the overall entity.