What got me started with this was hearing Steve Ballmer telling some people
the last few days that "Microsoft's main business is developing tools for
other people to write software". Or something like that.

I guess he's hoping that people have short memories. I think that all of the
.NET people don't seem to realize that .NET seems designed primarily to support
Micrsoft's own development efforts. All of their 3rd party development ISV
efforts are fair game for M$ a couple of years down the road, once they've
developed some good new ideas and proven the concept...

I'm considering writing a business school dissertation on the topic. Of course
there's always been competition/collaboration within this industry, but M$ takes
it one step further - "screwlaboration" might be a new b-school term for it - where
they colloborate only as long as they can restrain themselves from eating their own
offspring, making sure that their offspring all have short memories about what's
happened to everyone else who's ever counted on M$ to behave itself.

Yeah, I'm a bit pi$$ed.