Great people and not too much bureaucracy.
Pros
Note that this is specifically for Online Services Division and Bing Search in particular. - very smart people - lots of projects to work on, so technically it's possible to transition to a team you think you can be more productive. Though this is not very encouraged. - very smart managers that don't micromanage - modern technologies (latest versions of C#, Visual Studio and frameworks) - huge scale that makes it possible to uncover some of the bugs in .NET/CLR itself - separate offices!
Cons
- working on a tiny part of the huge project, doesn't help to feel ownership and limits the amount of learning - some of the decisions are driven by politics and from the top, which leaves engineers to pay for management games - source version control that makes it very hard to have multiple local feature branches. This noticeably decreases productivity - perks are very average (rare offsites to cinema, coffee machines and much appreciated foosball and pool tables), especially when comparing to Silicon Valley companies
