My impression from a past life working with the innards of Windows was that Microsoft weaponized terrible software engineering practices into a business advanta

My impression from a past life working with the innards of Windows was that Microsoft weaponized terrible software engineering practices into a business advantage. The awful underlying implementations made it very hard for competitors to reverse engineer anything and build compatible products. Sometimes, it even made it exceedingly hard to write drivers for Windows because of unresolvable race conditions in the kernel. Some of the best examples are CIFS/SMB and DCE/RPC over SMB which were bottomless pits of awful. One of my favorite anecdotes is the SMB print service described as the work of a clueless college student by one of the Samba developers who reverse engineered it. Microsoft cleaned up very quickly once DOJ forced SMB 2.0 (or whatever it was called) to be documented.