I previously worked at Microsoft in an unrelated area, but had a friend who worked on CosmosDB, and later a different part of Azure.
There are some Microsoft products I genuinely love, but some are terrible. To an extent it is a reflection of the inconsistency in internal teams. Culture, values, skill level, and quality bar are all over the place depending on who you talk to, even compared to other large companies.
From what I had heard, CosmosDB was not a healthy team, and I would not consider using it as a product.
With the funding of MS, how could this be turned around? Is it necessary to build a new team or is it enough to exchange leadership and let them bring in new members?
It's a good question well above my pay grade :). Changing culture isn't an easy problem.
I suspect the way Microsoft does interviewing and performance management (very local to the specific team) contributes to the inconsistency.
MSFT has also been fairly open to its employees that it does not try to compete with competitors like Google, Meta, or even Amazon, in terms of compensation. So it isn't really trying to get the best engineers, so long as it can continue to print money.
There are still folks there who are incredible, but the floor is shockingly low at times. Folks will self-select, so you will then get teams which are more homogeneously good or bad.
There are some Microsoft products I genuinely love, but some are terrible. To an extent it is a reflection of the inconsistency in internal teams. Culture, values, skill level, and quality bar are all over the place depending on who you talk to, even compared to other large companies.
From what I had heard, CosmosDB was not a healthy team, and I would not consider using it as a product.