Previously in tech, the joke was that Microsoft’s org chart was a bunch of divisions in a Mexican standoff.

Fast-forward to now, instead of pointing guns at each other, every division at Microsoft is yoked to the other via KPIs and bonus allocations. None can maneuver freely enough to ship excellent software. They all have to prioritize “synergy” (Copilot everything!) and integration instead.

In retrospect, at least the drama of a standoff yielded the turnarounds of distributed systems and open source work in the 2010s.