While this is truly embarrassing, it isn't surprising at all to see this kind of managerial waste and silliness from Microsoft.
Someone unfamiliar with MS corporate might wonder: "Wait, why are they having so much trouble with voice recognition in many languages for XB1 when MS has been working with those languages for several years now? Hasn't there been multiple language voice recognition in Windows since Windows 7? And haven't they been working on Kinect specifically for a few years now?"
To that, I would reply: "You don't know Microsoft."
This is the company that spends several years developing a new version of Windows,
scraps that work, spends another couple years, and the end result is Windows Vista. This is the company that spends over $400 million acquiring and funding Rare, and then utterly squanders the company. This is the company that has a team of 500 people working for multiple years on the Music app for Windows 8, and yet what they have to show for it in Windows 8.1 is less functional and practical than their own Zune desktop app.
MS are chronically inefficient and managerially incompetent across the board.