i was under the impression that they had made massive investments and really turned that around ... or is that ironically only windows? (or just a mistaken impression?)
microsoft has always had a culture of "just make it work yesterday" that led to shoddy code. they spent a lot of money, some of it on PR and some of it on real work, polishing up some of windows's more egregious problems a couple decades ago. but the attitude is deeply ingrained in the leadership. i also suspect that a lot of cost-cutting demanded by the business side gets implemented by off-shoring work to the cheapest possible workers with the minimum experience necessary to push a product out the door, but im not as familiar with microsoft these days.
There was the famous "Bill Gates memo" early in the century that stopped work on pretty much everything except security, citing Windows' atrocious reputation as an existential risk to Microsoft. It lead to a big improvement, including UAC and driver signing.
Also it's worth differentiating between Azure and the rest of the Microsoft silos. The Xbox isn't being cracked on the regular. The microvirt for applications and browsers in desktop Windows seems very well thought out. It seems as though the Azure team are pretty awful, though.
