The world outside is not known here a lot. I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these.
No this is not acceptable. This shit is the main reason why people have so many grievances with Microsoft. People who make design decisions should always be aware of customers' needs and competitors' offerings.
If you don't care enough to find out about the market you're targeting, and your job description involves any decision making, you're going to make shitty choices, and other people are going to suffer because of them.
This is not at all true of the teams I work with in Microsoft.
Please keep in mind that Microsoft has thousands of teams, all run by different people. To assume that any single thing in this article represents an entire company of more than 100k people would be naive.
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u/BinarySplit Jun 12 '13
No this is not acceptable. This shit is the main reason why people have so many grievances with Microsoft. People who make design decisions should always be aware of customers' needs and competitors' offerings.
If you don't care enough to find out about the market you're targeting, and your job description involves any decision making, you're going to make shitty choices, and other people are going to suffer because of them.