Their "throw as many SKUs at the market and see what sticks" model is very typical. That is not uniquely Microsoft and is very common in broad supply enterprises.

The only thing that is unique about microsoft is being in the right place at the right time, making the right B2B licensing deals and entrenching for decades because of it. Operating systems, window managers, filesystems, graphics, SDKs, IDEs, it's all been done before (and after) at equal, better and worse quality levels.

Their broad catalog is somewhat unique in having more SKUs that don't work well together (or at all) vs. ones that do, but the same applies to IBM and Google for example. And the things that do work well together tend to be based on technologies that have little to do with the company itself (like WebDAV and Kerberos), and that's not unique to Microsoft either.

The sophistication is in their business and SKU broadness, not in making proper end-to-end vertically integrated user experiences that make people happy. (well, they have started to get there in the gaming market I suppose)

If you have an example where that is not the case, and there was a product choice that merited their offering, I would love to hear about it.

This. The Microsoft long term business execution is amazing despite their resources involved in zillions of failed projects and acquisitions, and some horrible apps (e.g. Teams). It doesn't matter they are a success anyway. Other companies would be buried much before that. Always recommend the book Hard Drive (just in a yesterday's thread) [1]. I need to not forget to add now "Idea Man" [2] by Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder. It shows that the young Bill Gates was already a Titan.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39243044

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...