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Microsoft employs a lot of lifers who have no idea how good tooling is on the outside.

Presumably, there were a lot of lifers at MSFT during the Windows 7 years, yet I would consider the software being delivered during that period as being pretty good.

The decline happened after they fired off their SDETs and turned their customers into testers. The hyperfocus on cloud didn't help. Neither did the move towards clunky Electron apps, instead of first-class Windows applications.

Publicly traded companies have to keep releasing. They can't stop at 7, call it a day, and focus on important-but-not-sales-driving features.

Lifers may be there still, but they have to march to the beat of the stock market.

I use XCode, Android Studio and Emacs daily. I'd say all three are C- tools.

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