[vonmoltke]

Your first two paragraphs are not mutually exclusive. My former employer had a wealth of talented engineers who were overridden or ignored on key architecture decisions, either by semi-technical upper management or customers. Things had to be done a certain way because X wants them done that way, and by the time the bad decisions get highlighted the technical debt is too high for management to justify changing direction, and the program is forced to limp along with the crap they have.

My impression of Microsoft (entirely from the outside) is that they have this same problem.