TLDR: A former Azure Core engineer details how Microsoft risked losing OpenAI and government trust due to complacent decisions, including a plan to port half of Windows to a tiny chip, which the engineer deemed impossible. This mismanagement, among other issues, potentially cost Microsoft a trillion dollars in market capitalization and led to wasted engineering efforts.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Oy. Sadly, I suspect anybody who has worked in dev knows the outlines of this story: Management promising deliverables with unrealistic timelines and functionality; team leads with such poor internal product knowledge they don't recognize catastrophic issues until it's too late; poorly-trained devs squeezed to push out unscalable kludgy insecure nightmares "for now" that just never get addressed; systems gradually becoming a Jenga tower of manual workarounds and undocumented slapdash quick fixes... Ugh. Nightmare fuel.
Interesting. Same in construction industry!
There's nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.
The new twist to this story is those poorly-trained devs are given robot powerloaders for producing code now so they can slop out each teetering jenga block that much faster
This, and all the people coming and going leaving undocumented Jenga parts behind.
I'm terrified I'll never be able to find somewhere to work where this isn't the case. Deeply terrified.
I’ve been around a long time, and I have bad news for you….
systems gradually becoming a Jenga tower
Love this metaphor :)
A very entertaining read. I'm completely unsurprised, based on my experience trying to use Azure. Garbage platform.
And now they're hacking on that shitshow with CoPilot. Jesus wept.
lmfao
Article proposes that losing trust from OpenAI and the US Government are the causes of their woes, when truly the opposite is the case. OpenAI and the US Government are the reason why everyone hates MacroSlop and all of their products are rapidly degrading.1
The article discussed in depth how bad technical decisions made Microsoft product bad quality and unreliable. They they propose that this is the reason why Microsoft lost potential contracts with openai.
having been part of the Windows team since 1/1/2013
If he worked on Windows 11 he's the part of the problem.