> far more political than technological
I don't know. A company worth trillions of dollars does a pretty fine job of making Windows incrementally worse in new and interesting ways, each release.
There's some truth; the bloated company structure has contributed to these unforced errors, but just at an engineering level, people are releasing this tripe without the skill or training or backbone to know what is bad, and push back on toxic management decisions.
Engineers collaborating with oppressive management is a technical failure. Google is riddled with the same problem. I'm sure all the FAANG-a-likes do. Paying billions in salaries to sycophant devs. They have the market share to keep failing upwards. They don't deserve it.
Who says the engineers have any leverage they can push with? I sure didn't, when I worked there.
Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem that's played out in construction, automotive and software engineering dozens of times over.
The penalty for Microsoft ignoring their devs might just be a slow decline into irrelevance, not a bridge collapsing, or an autonomous vehicle hitting the lane barrier because the boss refuses to use LiDAR, but it's all bad management causing an engineering problem.
> Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem.
No, that's the very archetype of a political problem. It is a political problem that impacts the engineering output, yes, but still a political problem.