This is framing the story as a simple interaction (or interactions) between Harris and business leaders at Microsoft. It wasn't. Microsoft has a team responsible for translating between security researchers like Harris and its product teams/leadership. That team dismissed Harris because that team's priority was to ignore or downplay issues that were brought to it. Harris went around them and was still ignored. It seems like he tried everything short of calling the press directly to get someone to pay attention. Even after the issue was made public by other security researches, MS did nothing.

What happened here was a systematic failure on MS' part to address a fundamental flaw in one of the most critical pieces of security infrastructure at the entire company.

Companies like MS (and everyone else it seems) need to get out of this Jack Welsh mindset of the only thing that matters is the shareholders. MS acts as the gatekeeper of the most valuable organizations and governments on the planet. Their profits have to take a backseat to this type of thing or they shouldn't be allowed to sell their products to critical organizations and governments.