Inside the new Files On-Demand Experience on macOS

marekbartovic Please leave the developers out of this. Developers have functionally zero say in how a product like one drive functions, which features they develop, or how well any of that gets tested. There are whole teams for all of that in any large vendor.

No, this is on the product management/product lifecycle management and support/"customer experience" teams. The product managers make the calls about deadlines, feature prioritization, and (usually) adequacy of testing.  The support teams handle aspects of direct customer interaction, including things like documentation and responding to folks in the forums.

And even here, I'd lean more on pointing the finger at product management than the support teams.  The chances are that the community staffers and the documentation nerds would love nothing more than to make this whole kerfuffle go away, but they just don't have anything they can possibly tell us, because that's all stuck in some committee somewhere in product management.

This is a cultural problem within the relevant product management org...and quite frankly at Microsoft more broadly.

I can totally accept that products get released in states that are bad. It happens. That alone isn't reason to shout (initially). For most companies there will be a "mea culpa" followed by "all right, here's what we plan to do about this". If you're extraordinarily badass, you'll even publicly present a post-mortem analysis of the problem after the crisis is considered resolved, with a discussion of the lessons learned and the steps taken afterwards to prevent recurrence of the issue.

And that is where the fault lies. Yes, mistakes were made. Everyone makes mistakes. But the mistakes were compounded here by this-will-end-up-in-a-textbook-level of awful post-mistake communication. 

Somewhere along the line one or more people - almost certainly in product management or one of the teams that for some reason holds a veto of product management's decisions - decided that Microsoft was not going to take any of these problems seriously enough to communicate with the people they've harmed. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find out that within Microsoft the prevailing feeling of the people with veto power is that "there is nothing wrong, these customers just have to learn to change how they do everything".

That is the rot at the core of Microsoft's culture. It has been for a while.

But the poor devs? They just code what they're told to code. They rarely get any say in anything; that all happens layers away from them.

No, save your ire for the product management and support teams; choosing to release before this was properly tested, and then dropping the ball on communication...that's on them. Solving those problems is their job*.

*Edit: with some compassion reserved for the possibility that the product management teams and/or support teams could be in the position of really wanting to help their customers, but just not empowered/brave enough to stand up to some forceful personality with veto powers who could just be throwing an idiot spanner in the works.  You'd be surprised how much damage one bully can do in a vendor org if they're **bleep** enough, and everyone else has been toughly terrified enough that they won't speak up...