Microsoft vs Microsoft: C# DateTime vs IE 8 Date Object
There's a lot that can be said about what happens to a software corporation once it becomes very large, and one negative aspect is that your products eventually become disconnected. This is an inevitability, because in order for any specific product to be effective and accepted in the mass markets, it has to be tailored to the people that use them. What you end up with is a bunch of software products each targeting disparate markets, all part of a suite of very specialized tools. That being said, I think Microsoft's development of and complete move to the .NET framework helps to resolve a lot of these issues for code development. I would even bet that the main reason they initially researched the development of the .NET framework is because they knew they needed a solid, easy-to-use code base for all of their projects that would drastically ease interoperability, speed development, and improve general code stability for their products. The natural side-effect of this is th