MS employee here. No joke, the Microsoft of today is like a 180 from the Microsoft of even 3, or 5 years ago.

Satya Nadella has been on a long-term campaign to transform the culture in some pretty inspiring ways, to be honest. It's led to the departure of long-time fixtures in leadership--the most shocking of which was the head of the Windows team (remember the agonizingly pushy nature of the Windows 10 rollout?). Today, there is no "Windows" team anymore, as they've been absorbed under the "Experiences and Devices" group. And increasingly, open source and embracing of other technologies has become a shocking priority (the decision to move to Chromium-based browser was especially shocking, but on further thought, consistent with Satya's philosophy).

So, yeah! I'm pretty optimistic of Microsoft's future. It's going to take some time to shed a lot of the old image it earned under Bill Gates in the 90's and Steve Ballmer more recently. But in my opinion, I think the company has by now earned what will likely take a few more years to become more apparent to the rest of the world. Basically, the CEO didn't just transform the company from a Windows-based business to a Cloud service provider; he absolutely moved to change the culture as the foundation for that move.

As a Microsoft employee, do you have any thoughts on whether this will cause Microsoft to start a hiring spree of people with active US Government security clearances?

Microsoft has definitely turned the corner in terms of culture with some projects like Typescript, WSL, .NET Core, etc., but Azure is very much still the "old Microsoft." It was started before this turn and has many of the same old stinks that anyone who's worked in Enterprise Microsoft-land can smell.

They may yet right the ship as time goes on and their growing revenue points in the direction that they will, but anyone who's used all three major cloud-providers knows they're still at the bottom of the totem pole.