You are correct, it has been its own org for a long time.

I don’t see the decoupling from the rest of MSFT ever happening though. Working with some of the Office codebase and some adjacent ones years ago, it is so tightly coupled on a technical level to many other MSFT products, it is pretty much impossible to separate. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that there is some level of Xbox code integration within Office, and I am only halfway joking here.

AD integration alone is so fundamental, without it the whole product starts falling apart. Hell, some of the code in SharePoint has hard dependencies on rather ancient Skype/Lync code, and some pieces of core functionality code are still hanging onto files that were last touched 10+ years ago. It was kind of a bittersweet feeling to have to edit a piece of code and reading comments, and then realizing that the most recent changes to it were submitted by your manager around a decade ago, back when they were just starting out their career as a software dev.

And let’s not even talk about Teams, which has its fangs set extremely deep all over Office products (and beyond).