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Every big company tries to claim they have changed, will change and are currently in a process of change.

This is insightful, and in addition to this, culture change can and does happen at companies.

Just because they're evil today, doesn't mean they'll be evil tomorrow.

Similarly, just because they're good today, doesn't mean they'll be good tomorrow.

We should always look with suspicion at megacorps acting with what appears to be outrageous altruism. Companies don't throw around $7.5 billion without expecting to profit from it.

> For instance if department leader's KPIs and bonus structure hasn't changed, they will continue to actively fight open source.

They did change, and quite radically when Kevin Turner (then COO) was ousted (or voluntary left, it's unclear).

> Also what happens to the devs who are there for 20+ years now

Today, the biggest focus for Microsoft is Azure. And incidentally Azure grew enormously under Satya, so they had to hire a lot of new people there. A lot of them wouldn't even have considered joining MS under Ballmer, and a lot of them were hired specifically for there knowledge of non-MS technologies. Things might be different in older divisions, such as Windows, but at least in the division that now matter the most, the culture is dead-set on open source and the values that Satya promotes.

> But in reality most companies stay stuck at exactly that point in time where they were most successful

This doesn't really make sense. How did they get to be that successful? They must have changed something from an earlier point, when their most successful point was less successful.

Your claim is like saying "A companies stock is always worth less than its historical maximum". It's only true until there's a new maximum.

> Microsoft is likely stuck ~10 years go, where Windows XP was at its peak

I feel that they were like this during the Windows 8 era.

But I like to believe they had their wake-up call (the failure of Windows RT, of Windows Phone, the rise of macOS and iOS) to a point where they were ready to try something radical, and what we're seeing now is the result of those efforts.