As someone with lots of experience reading Microsoft documents I disagree, in my opinion Microsoft was the worst company designing formats because:

1-Their programmers were terrible designers. Companies like Apple design first, program later. With Microsoft it was the opposite. I don't care how good a mechanic(programmer) you are if you are bad engineer(designer) and can't see the forest out of the tree.

2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE, it is proven that Microsoft actually introduced bugs to break compatibility on things like DOS(to combat competitors like DR DOS)or AVI format so people were forced to use their products.

3-There were too much programmers(most of them not so good). While Netscape put to work 20-40 people, Microsoft employed 1.000 to destroy competition with Explorer. When mission was accomplished and competition was destroyed(and nobody dare to enter the given marketplace anymore) all this people moved to other projects like Office.

4-Perversive incentives. The social promotion under Ballmer incentived people to create lots of bad code fast instead of little good code.