true, but that just shows how useless "would my mental caricature of celebrity figure x have been able to survive in my mental caricature of vast heterogeneous institution y?" is as an aid for anyone's understanding of the world.

I could've pointed to Erik Meijer as an innovative rock star developer who appears to have done well in the MSFT environment, being largely responsible for the major additions to a shipping version of their flagship application framework. How much does that tell me about the internal MSFT culture as a whole? Not much, any more than this WSJ anecdote does.