Opinion: Whither Microsoft? A view from the neighborhood

Feroze Motafram is an operations consultant based in Sammamish, Wash., and founder of Avestan LLC. This piece is adapted from a LinkedIn post.

Someone asked me recently what made me think about writing this. The trigger, I told them, was simpler than you might expect.

I live in Sammamish, in the shadow of Microsoft’s looming presence. Microsoft employees are my neighbors, my social circle, the people I run into at weekend gatherings. Over time I noticed that conversations with them had a distinctive gravitational pull — always inward, toward reorgs, internal politics, who reports to whom now, who’s ascendant, who’s out. Customers were rarely part of the conversation. This usually means navigating the organization has become more consuming than building anything within it.

Microsoft’s stock decline and the softening of real estate in this corridor (both affecting me…