How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

A former Azure Core engineer recounts arriving on his first day to find a 122-person org seriously planning to port Windows-based VM management agents - 173 of them, which nobody could fully explain - onto a tiny, low-power ARM chip running Linux. The stack was already failing to scale on server-grade hardware. He frames this organizational disconnect as the opening act of a larger story about how Azure's dysfunction contributed to Microsoft losing trust with the US government and OpenAI, and ultimately vaporizing a trillion dollars in market cap.