Is this the same old it compiles, ship it! Microsoft Spolsky talks about? I remember them in a totally different way, as a company which used paying customers a

Is this the same old it compiles, ship it! Microsoft Spolsky talks about? I remember them in a totally different way, as a company which used paying customers as beta testers, where no single application used the same design language, where spurious windows with indecipherable error messages popped up randomly... in other words something close to the antithesis of what is written above. Part of this comes from Microsoft's focus on backwards compatibility which makes it possible for them to keep older parts around - just click through a few controls in Windows 10 to end up in something which looks like it started off in the Windows 3.x period - but another reason is probably the rivalry between different groups within Microsoft which want to push their own products based on their own toolkits.