My comment wasn't about reasonableness. My comment was about organizational reality.
How many times have you seen the two coincide in large orgs, especially ones as complex as Microsoft?
People treat organizational decisions from large orgs as if they were made by a particularly stupid, incompetent individual, but that's not what happens. They're made by organizational processes, incentive structures, and emergent behaviors.
That's not cynicism -- structuring over 100,000 people to collectively act in ways one might consider reasonable is a genuinely hard problem. We tend to blame unreasonable people or malicious behavior, but every person in an organization can be smart, ethical, and reasonable, and stupid stuff will still happen.
If there were one bad apple, like Enron, it'd be fine to blame the people there. If it's nearly every large organization in the history of humanity -- including formerly good ones like Google -- it's reasonable to look for a more systemic explanation than unreasonable people.
Put yourself in the position of a richly-compensated engineer.
Your boss: "We need to launch this, or our division is shut down."
Your web search: Famous AI failure
You would like to stay richly compensated. What do you do?
This is one scenario, and waaay oversimplified, but the way you get richly-compensated is by doing what's required to be richly-compensated. That usually has more to do with corporate politics than long-term corporate outcomes.
