I think the thing to understand about behemoths like Microsoft is that if the "others" are collecting data then your career will benefit if you hep Microsoft do what the "others" are doing.
Do you think we're yet at a position where we could catalog a set of "primitives" that are foundational to programming systems? (Where "systems" are fundamentally distributed and independent of software platform, programming language or hardware implementation)
Remember when all the Microsofties were gloating about how it was never gonna happen to them?
Pepperidge farm remembers…