I heard the rumours, but this seems to have sealed it –
employees at MSFT basically “own” blocks of code for themselves.

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/06/22/431394.aspx

Its not that I disagree with the policy, and in fact I’m
a de-factor owner of entire modules at my current
place of work, but owning a few API’s seems funny – I guess
when we’re talking on the scale of Windows, you’d need to have incredibly
fine granularity of code ownership – the worst thing would be for a bug
to arise in a block of code, and for no one to know what it does or who should fix
it.

Just interesting to think….