It's not only from organizations and powerful entities, I like to apply this logic in normal day-to-day communications with people too.

If someone has a very strong opinion about something and tries to "convert" everyone to it (say, vegetarianism, meditation, emacs, or whatever), it is usually because someone is very insecure about him/herself this trait, and made it part of their identity. It usually has no point discussing this with a person like that.

> When it comes to propaganda from large and powerful entities, usually it help to reverse the meaning to really understand the message.

This works very well for advertisements.

e.g. "Our flights are very comfortable" -> Long haul flights are, in general, cramped and gruelling.

"Our broadband is fast" -> Broadband isn't fast enough.

The selling point of the product addresses a perceived deficiency in the product category. It's safe to assume that the product is, at best, slightly less bad at it than the competitors.

Except I don't think this is true of Ballmer when it came to "developers, developers, developers". I doubt Microsoft has willingly done anything to harm developers that use its products, certainly not for "profits next quarter". Sure, they deprecated some technologies (like Silverlight), but that was in response to market realities (like the iPhone and HTML5), and even then they are supported for years. All the various complaints lodged against Microsoft, such as Spolsky's "fire and motion", are more rationally explained by the vagaries of how technologies progress organically in large companies and in the industry in general.

The "new" Microsoft is supposed to be "cloud first" and "mobile first". Yet Azure has among the most lowest uptimes and Microsoft is dead-last in mobile. So you may be on to something there!