I used to work at Microsoft. I heard second hand that some exec (I believe they said it was Ballmer) in the last couple of years made the decision that Microsoft would make privacy a competitive differentiator. This sounds great on the surface, but it has lead to seriously unfortunate behavior.
For example, I worked on one of the first server manageability products that was completely hosted on the web. I was really excited to apply what I was learning from HN and the Lean Startup movement to a real online product and not boxed software. Then reality sunk in when we wanted to implement some very common features like A/B testing, surveys, email open rate tracking, exposure control, et al. Our legal and privacy teams were highly reluctant to allow us to do these because it could violate Microsoft's stance on privacy.
Some of the most memorable arguments were:
* "A/B testing and exposure control are not acceptable for our paying customers. Every customer must see the exact same version of the software at the same time." [Would you rather have a bad feature affect 100% of customers or 1% of customers?]
* "Google is getting a lot of bad press for all of the data Chrome sends to Google so we should minimize the amount of data captured and stored from this product." [I heard this in an official privacy training the same day that Chrome overtook IE in market share. Also, my product was specifically meant to capture lots of data about servers and analyze it for potential problems.]
* "We understand that these practices may be common place at [name any internet company here, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Bingo Card Creator], but we are not them. You must find a precedent that is set inside Microsoft before we can proceed."
I hope that Microsoft does succeed in making privacy a competitive differentiator, but I feel they lack tact and common sense in many cases.