[general_ai]

+1. I know some insiders at MS and their build/test/deployment story is universally very crappy. Things barely work, held together by curse words and duct tape.

Googlers like to joke internally that Google looks like a race car from the outside and like Moving Castle from Hayao Miyazaki'a cartoon from the inside, but that's not the case at all. Comparatively speaking it's a race car inside and out, it's just that the insiders don't know how shitty things are elsewhere.

P.S. I heard Bing is different, but I have no visibility into it, so can't comment.

[christophilus]

I worked in the cloud at MS roughly 7 years ago, and Bing was very different from anything else. The MS cloud services were a total mess. I mean, as in hard to overstate how bad. In contrast, Bing was a well-oiled machine. Simple build, simple deploy, simple devops, simple test, very consistent processes across all of their teams.

At the time, Azure was a joke (partly due to the fact that the initial teams were headed up by ex Office devs with no cloud experience, if I remember correctly). But Azure was cannibalizing the Bing team pretty hard. I hear that strategy worked and that Azure is in much more capable hands now.