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cameronh90today at 12:50 PM1 replyview on HN

Microsoft have historically tended to dogfood their own products.

Obviously you want to be aware of what else is on the market, and use the right tool for the job -- but equally if you have a directly competing product, you'd prefer your org's telemetry and suggestions are directed towards improving your own software rather than your competitors'.


Replies

Anon1096today at 1:08 PM

This was always a little weird to be because Microsoft internally is actively hostile to cross-org collaboration. If you worked in most of Azure you basically have 0 lanes of communication with someone from the Windows team and vice versa. Triply so for stuff like Kusto or Teams which you'd be dogfooding daily. I guess if there's a horrible stop the world bug it'd get surfaced through telemetry but normal user feedback is not a thing.

Compared to working at other big techs, where I was able to direct msg the engineers on the team for internal protobuf or datalake services in addition to user groups that were generally responsive it was just strange. Also Microsoft doesn't have a monorepo so you can't just commit patches to their service because you don't have access to their repos which I pretty regularly do elsewhere.