>That's just incorrect.
>The market, not the manufacturer, makes things obsolete.
>I reluctantly stopped writing Foxpro for DOS and Unix because my customers wanted to use Windows.
>You're vilifying MS for making things that most people wanted to use.

Programming languages aren't like cotton candy. There's a lot of time and effort sunk into them. For example, all the VB.NET developers would be well within their rights to be mad if MS decided it wasn't going to put as much into them as C#. Then lo and behold 5 years down the line MS drops VB.NET. But no one should be surprised - MS stopped investing in in it. That should have been a clear sign. Well, no it wasn't. A clear sign would have been - "We're killing this product in 5 years. period"

If Microsoft had a choice between giving developers what they really want or something like what they really want mixed in with a lot of hooks for making developers even more dependent on them and needing to spend more for MS products, which do you think Microsoft might choose? That kind of thinking can get you only so far, especially if you're an arrogant company like MS.