Anecdotal, but sometimes things seem so dysfunctional within MS that I can't believe they get anything done at all: I once met a professor at a conference who said his grad students were reverse-engineering some of Microsoft's distributed system protocols (not MSRPC). I asked him why he didn't directly contact the team owning that project at Microsoft for help instead, and if I should introduce him to them -- I had met them before and they were pretty friendly and eager to get people to use their stuff. He said he was doing the reverse engineering for Microsoft. When I was like "WTF, why?!", he wouldn't give any details but said in an offhand way that MS needed somebody to document the system.
Now, I cannot imagine what unearthly sequence of events led to a snafu where MS had to ask an outside party to reverse engineer their own stuff in order to document it... But that may explain your experience.
Now, I cannot imagine what unearthly sequence of events led to a snafu where MS had to ask an outside party to reverse engineer their own stuff in order to document it... But that may explain your experience.