tl;dr: Microsoft lets Product Managers own features, and their PMs are just engineers with different hats, so as a result MS products are badly designed. I fi

tl;dr: Microsoft lets Product Managers own features, and their PMs are just engineers with different hats, so as a result MS products are badly designed. I find this entirely unconvincing. The crux of the author's argument is that because PMs have engineering backgrounds, when development goes up against usability (whatever that means) usability loses. Well, I doubt MS makes a practice of hiring PMs incapable of doing their jobs. I also don't see why a technical person should be considered incapable of assessing usability. In my (admittedly limited) experience, non-technical HCI people are sometimes worse at designing interfaces than programmers, whatever the oh so amusing stereotype might be. As a counterexample: While MSFT has about double the PM:Dev ratio of Google, Google PMs nearly always come from CS backgrounds too...and I don't think the author would make the same accusations about Google that he makes about MS.