Given the large, diversified, and empowered engineering structure at Microsoft, this challenge was sometimes greater than at other tech companies. It had led us in the past sometimes to maintain for years two or more overlapping services, an approach that almost never turned out well. Apple, in contrast, had sometimes relied on its narrower product focus and Steve Jobs’s centralized decision making to solve this problem. It was perhaps ironic, but European regulators were doing us something of a favor by defining a singular approach that required engineering compromise all around.
