Actually there was one more quote:

Decades of neoliberalism has incentivized their rise, because when you incentivize society to become management — to "manage or run a company" rather than do something for a reason or purpose — you are incentivizing a kind of corporate narcissism, one that bleeds into whatever field the person goes into, be it public or private. We go to college as a means of getting a job after college using the grades we got in college, rendering many students desperate to get the best grades they can versus "learn" anything, because our economy is riddled with power structures controlled by people that don't know stuff and find it offensive when you remind them.

I'd not say this is a story about Microsoft. Far more time is spent on journalism than MS.

To start, Zitron is simply better at this sort of analysis than I am. Which isn't something I like to admit (I want to be the best at everything!), but he has more dots to connect than I do. He basically stitches together about six columns and blog posts I've written over the years and effectively synthesizes them into one coherent narrative.

Management has become completely unhinged from production, unaware of what the fuck we actually do and uninterested in wasting time improving anything other than their own image. Fuck the product, I got mine.

In a way, it's oddly ... soothing? Like, I'm not crazy but perhaps a bit too aware of where late-stage capitalism was going a bit earlier than most. Such awareness doesn't exactly buy beer.