Raymond Chen's blog in particular has been well worth reading for insight into why MS has made some of the crazy-seeming technical decisions it has for well over a decade now.

A lot of them boil down to "incredible contortions to support applications written years ago to which the source code, and probably the original developers, are no longer available."

you could always find non bulshitting ms people around:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://sortingitoutv2.wordpress.com/ < this was on MSDN and moved here, most old content disappeared and is available trough archive.org

MS is so big, hard to judge by a handful of individuals either ways

..and by lately, you mean 11 years ago.

The post is from 2004. This no-bullshit thing isn't exactly new. :)