Microsoft is a big place. I recommend focusing on the parts they do well rather than getting tribal. All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026:

  Windows Server 
  SQL Server 
  .NET/C#/F#/Nuget
  Visual Studio [code]
  SSMS
  AAD/EntraID
  Defender
  DirectX
  Excel 

I agree that Teams still kind of sucks and that Azure is a complete dumpster fire of a cloud, on average. But that doesn't mean we should throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. We should employ a multi-stage filtration system and extract whatever value we can.

I feel the same about Big G, with my leading hypothesis being that they are leaning into hands free Ai too much. I certainly have direct evidence for that from Google in the form of a slop deck they sent me, and perceived evidence through Google Cloud degradation.