Dogfooding is a way of life at Microsoft. Sometimes to very painful degrees. We've been using Exchange 14 as our one and only email server solution for quite a

Dogfooding is a way of life at Microsoft. Sometimes to very painful degrees. We've been using Exchange 14 as our one and only email server solution for quite a while, and yes it has gone down a fair amount and cost a ton of productivity, but it also gave the Exchange team invaluable feedback. I've also got some very painful personal experiences of dogfooding Team Foundation Server in its early days. It's not like we can say "eh this early build sucks, let's go back to X for now", because there is no X, it's been completely removed. The dogfooding is hardcore on purpose. But the "MS employee using non-MS tech" myth is really a myth. At least nowadays it is. MS employees will and do use anything and everything. As a simple example, I personally know at least 20 MS employees with iPhones (including myself). We also have no problem pointing out to teams when their competitors are better (there are certain teams at MS that really get a whipping, from both the public and the rest of MS, I don't envy them at all.)