&quot;Microsoft doesn&#x27;t know how to...&quot; is an unfounded disparagement.<p>Microsoft <i>definitely</i> knows how to write software, okay? They&#x27;re really good at it. They ship a lot of it. There are many people there who are brighter than you and I and they know their stuff cold.<p>Microsoft is full of<p>- legacy stuff that is really hard to change (many, many reasons for this, few of them pleasant but all of them real)<p>- conflicting priorities (which bugs do we fix? will we destabilize the product if we fix them? are there more important things to do?)<p>- political bullshit, in the atmosphere of which it is hard to do the right thing<p>I left Microsoft three years ago, having spent 11 years there. I saw some howlingly bad software written (little of which shipped), and there are definitely groups there that are stronger than others, but I would never apply the phrase &quot;fundamentally they don&#x27;t know how to write software&quot;.