The use itself must go on his tax form. A company car has to be declared. At the value and value-declination of a 500SL, this could net him a year or two in prison if not.

Stop trying your simplistic example and admit it was either inaccurate or made up.

Their business is going well. Why would they care about their customers? Of course, if ever a real alternative comes along (or they cannot bribe enough people anymore), quite a few people will never look back.

They are just true to themselves with the most crappy thing they can offer. As there are by far enough stupid MS fanbois and people that think there is no alternative, they do not have to do anything well in order to continue to make huge and entirely undeserved, profits.

That said, the only legitimization for an OS-vendor App-Store is a high quality level and security level. Otherwise you can just download and buy anywhere.

Bullshit and bullshit. The 500SL needs to go on his tax forms as income, otherwise he faces tax fraud. It needs to be transferred form their official inventory to his ownership, otherwise it stays theirs. For that he needs to officially register as the new owner. So there will be nothing "off the books" here.

It is true that aural contracts are binding in Germany, but they went out of fashion a long time ago because with them nobody can prove anything.

You also miss that this is German company, not an US one. Culture is different. Also, you cannot order anything bindingly over email in Germany.

Problem is you are almost right. Actual qualified engineers doing software are a rare thing.

From what I have seen who gets laid-off, there are a lot of really bad engineers, especially in the software area. Then there are those that have not learned anything new in years and have become obsolete. Surprisingly, this can frequently hit young people that did not bother with the basics, but went straight to "Java Script Engineer" or the like but cannot do anything else and cannot learn due to missing general computing skills.

You cannot do "cheap oversees engineering" for anything that requires good engineers. For bad engineers that maybe reach the "works somehow" product quality level, you can. If you are bad at what you do, you are always easy to replace, no matter the job.

Which is pretty much a meaningless number for software. No, the engineer should have an idea of the overall business plan and may have input for it.

Quite possible, I agree. Unfortunately, once you take the engineering out of the engineer, his quality of life is dramatically reduced. There are hybrid solutions though and a project head that is not afraid to get his hands dirty and does it well can command a lot of respect.

May still be worded better, but SHIT clearly describes IE and any possible successor best.

Imaginary stuff is done by imaginary engineers, also known as "signal processing experts" ;-)

If they can, yes. The most efficient project team is one really good engineer and one business person keeping all administrative stuff (except budget things) away so that they does not distract the engineer. So, yes, really good engineers do everything that is engineering.

If you are a good engineer, you have something that no business person will ever have (except at the very top maybe): You are really hard to replace. Use that!

Actually, no. Business and tech alternate. The original driver may be tech (something becomes possible) or business (somebody hopes that something will become possible, like Edison that lied about the lightening bulb properties in his patent application), but afterwards it is usually both driving things. Or in some rare cases it is only tech, like for example, in some FOSS projects. It never is only business that drives things.