That said, ads in bing chat IS adding a flavour, and I don't like it, not one bit.
"Culture" doesn't define a flavor, it's just having a consistent flavor driven by shared values at all levels of the company: If Microsoft had culture, that culture could be "we are always the plain vanilla ice cream for our customers"
"Culture" is what keeps you from adding soy sauce to your vanilla ice cream that has managed to captivate the globe... just to make a few pennies. Which is what these ads are.
How you're describing it, "culture" sounds more like "values", which might be a better understanding.
These ads are a great example: So many teams did thing right to get "BingGPT" in everyone's minds.
But then some tasteless exec looking to notch "monetized leading LLM driven search engine" on their belt got to ask some developers to get some ads into the thing and now they've dumped on all the hard work that came before that.
If they had a proper culture ideally an exec like that would not work at MS, and even if they did they'd have hit resistance on so many levels. Developers would not want to work on it. Designers would push back, PMs would deprioritize. At the end of the day their short-sighted idea would have stayed just that: an idea.
Ads are more like the smell of old cigarette smoke and urine.
Edit: To clarify, I run Windows 11 Home.