This is bad. This is really really bad. This completely matches my personal experience. Microsoft QA under Nadella is only part of company I think underperforms.

As far as I can remember from "How Google tests software" , Google doesn't have whole QA division too (other than a elite kinda testers) and testing is integrated to developers job(SDET). This was not true for Microsoft for long time. It would take a lot of time for Microsoft to become on par with Google in testing.

That's not what happened. Layoffs were across the company but mostly focused on "redundancies" with the Nokia purchase. Of the non-Nokia-related layoffs, SDE, SDET, and PM were all affected. SDET took a bigger hit but it was nowhere near all of them. The discipline was renamed "quality".

Later, the quality org was merged with engineering, "eliminating" the testers by making them devs. This change happened across the company but not simultaneously.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee, but this has all been reported on. e.g. Ars Technica covered part of this:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-mi...