I'm sorry you misunderstood me; I was intentionally not specific in what Microsoft wants to sell more of. This has little to do with the number of copies of VS. It has to do with Microsoft's battles with Oracle, Adobe, Google, etc... It has to do with control over the market place, period.

Woodie, I don't know your financial or experience background, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but when you have millions $$$ invested in technology, as I do, it costs major bucks to turn the curve.

If you're following me so far, changing 250,000++ lines of source code to a different language, is an investment that should last a set amount of time; however, the pace Microsoft is setting makes that investment less valuable or not worthy of even making.

You can't force 1,000s of clients, who spend $10s to $100s of thousands each, to switch to different software every three years--that's just milking them.

At the pace Microsoft is setting, I may decide to layoff my staff because my clients and I can't keep up and that means more job losses here in the U S and A. If you don't understand the economics of it, perhaps you will in 10 years when your job is outsourced to a gentleman in India making $4/hour to do the same as you, and he has two degrees!!!

If you have nothing invested, or if it is in your interest to keep alive a never ending job supply because companies unnecessarily constantly need programmers to change and then re-change source code (in other words they are being milked), Microsoft is fantastic and you drink their Koolaid. If you have mega bucks invested, you don't mind going along for the benefit of the clients (new is always better--I believe this) once every decade, but the pace must be for the right reasons, not because a monopolistic company is trying to corner the market and kill more competitors.

And yes, it has changed dramatically over the past 20 years; I should know, I've been programming for longer than that and I have personally witnessed it all. How many C compilers existed in 1988? How many exist today? Perhaps you meant 10 years.

Sorry if I have offended you with the above. Please read it several times if you wish to respond.

>>>>>>>Derek, that sentiment is shared by many but if you look at MS's numbers, they dont make anything on the developer tools. In most cases that practically give Visual Studio away. Where MS makes money is people writing apps for the Windows platform. The "excessively rapid language/technology changes" is to sell more Windows, Windows Server, Office, SQl Server. The better the apps are that run on these platforms the better these platforms sell. That business model hasn't changed in 20 years and it works!