For me the fascinating thing is looking at the list of authors to recognize so many from the 2005-2012 Microsoft SQL Server team. Folk I know personally as exceptional performers. Same when I look at Aurora papers. I see this as the result of Ballmer's famous HR initiatives and the massive brain drain that occurred at Microsoft around 2010-ish.
Add to this the lack of vision and direction, catastrophic acquisitions, dismal flagship product releases. At the time there were running jokes about the Inbox filling up with "After 15 years, is time to send that email" subject lines...
[0] http://old.seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2001938654_microsoft26.html
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-brings-back-the-towels-5000148135/
[2] http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03/internal-microsoft-compensation.html