When a company has its street named after themselves and a fleet of buses to carry employees to the company, one can start considering Microsoft as a state with all the necessary bureaucracy.
Microsoft is long past the point of realizing they don't need to make their product good to keep users. Everyone who uses Windows is stuck using it because of software lock-in, or it's what's on the laptop their job provides, or because they can't afford a Mac. Outside of niche communities, there aren't a lot of "Windows fans" out there these days.
They'll gladly harvest your data whether you like them or not!
Ha, as if the situation with macOS is much better? The OS space is a (lopsided) duopoly, both Microsoft and Apple know it and have pulled down their sleeves long ago.
Some people buy Apple products because they have succeeded in making it a minor status symbol. It's interesting, because one symbol is wealth (Apple devices cost more), but the other is a symbol of being a creative professional.
I would describe myself via metaphor: the redneck who likes to race cars, and doesn't care about the car as long as it has most of its wheels, and he'll drive the hell out of it.
Large companies are the same for the same reasons, the relationship between you paying them and their personal benefit is so incredibly remote that it might as well not exist.
Yup, definitely has felt that way for years, they do try to consolidate but it takes years. When I was trying to setup something for customer support I was navigating all of their redundant products, Teams, Skype, Skype for Business (different thing), Lync.
But that is way more normal for microsoft, because it's about redundant products that get merged eventually. What's not typical is internal dependencies being exposed, the case above were many MSFT teams/products in the same tier, the case in this article is many MSFT teams/products in a single vertical, at different tiers of the supply chain.
It's possible that this is more a feature of open source, this being an open source MSFT product (.NET core) and the report having been filed through an open source channel (github issues). I think that if the issue were submitted to some account manager or customer service rep through a channel linked to a paying customer account, the response would have been very different.
But you cannot expect a quality customer service response if there's no $ being paid to the maintainers. Whether it be Microsoft or whatever FOSS project.