Unbelievable. A teenager outdid the engineering of Microsoft, a major corporation. Brilliant.
Indeed. Like a hot-rod motorboat skipping circles around a lumbering cruise ship. And I'll bet you can count the number of hours he slept during that time on a few fingers at most.
The individual software engineers at Microsoft are very good, often brilliant themselves. But the corporate culture and inertia are deadly to real innovation. Which explains why Microsoft has always had to acquire or steal it, rather than develop it internally. The things they did entirely internally are notably poor, such as Microsoft Bob.
Of course, there was some nepotism involved in Bob, too....