I have a good friend that worked at Microsoft in the R&D labs for years (he was one of the leads on Synth and all that photo-rendering fanciness that eventually

I have a good friend that worked at Microsoft in the R&D labs for years (he was one of the leads on Synth and all that photo-rendering fanciness that eventually found its way into mobile Win and had a extremely popular iOS app for a while) and he gave us the low-down of how Microsoft works from the inside recently. * Balmer doesn't lead, he believes in "survival of the fittest" in the more jungle sense of the word. While he doesn't actively pit the product teams against one another, he encourages them to battle with each other and only come to him with the result, never with the conflict or questions about who should do what. * As a result of this, the teams HATE each other. The Dev Tools team hates the Windows team. The Windows team hates the Xbox team. The Xbox team hates the MSN team and so on. There is a particularly odd level of animosity between the devtools and windows teams. The Xbox doesn't even run a special version of Windows, it is a custom OS built with some of the core kernel, but very little else. This created a lot of conflict between those two teams as well. Every team feels like they are 6 months away from being cut and as a result try and block any effort any other team makes at impeding on their turf. * The company has shed most of the strong/independent/curious lead devs by now a many found it impossibly pointless to work there. Discovered a new way to make NTFS faster? Too bad, it's not going in the mainline. Found a new way to make DX render faster on modern hardware in low-powered systems? Great, now go sit at your desk and shut up. There was no nurturing of new ideas because of this "protect your turf at all costs!" culture that Balmer created. My buddy talked for about an hour... it was fascinatingly horrible to listen to, but it seems while BillG was the benevolent dictator type much like Jobs was, Balmer is the polar opposite in every wrong way. More like a absentee father that loves watch you fight with your brothers, but otherwise doesn't really care what you do.