I like your "I'd rather build things". I think you can also build things at big companies, but it's just different types of things and much different process. It's just that, depending on your org, you may end up building more slowly (sometimes way more slowly) or you will build something that was decided by others and that you didn't have much input on.

To be fair, some times you can build things much faster as the process for capital expenditure of sizes necessary is more straightforward. "Oh? You need to spend 20 million dollars on some hardware? Cool. Follow this accelerated RFP procedure."

I absolutely agree that typically the impact you can have at a big company can be huge. But it may come with a cost - adjustment to that structure.

As I mentioned in the post, it is a great environment for many people, and I'm glad to hear about your case.

Working at Microsoft (in Windows Azure), this was the first outage since I joined the org, so I did not know what to expect from the company in terms of transparency on this outage. However, given other presentations or papers on the Windows Azure technology and how open they were publicly, I expected a good job here.

Bill Liang's post confirmed how transparent Microsoft wants to be with its customers, what is really nice. And I appreciate how seriously Microsoft is attempting to learn from these incidents and putting measures in place.