>Well, turmoil and disillusionment appear to be rampant in Redmond. Whether that's his intention (why hire them in the first place if it were?) is unknowable at this remove.
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>>>>The problem as described in Scott's post is that middle management (the lords) answers only to itself when the prince (Ballmer) is weak. This is all-too-typical for large corporations, and hasn't changed since Machiavelli documented the phenomenon.
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>>Ballmer's inclination seems to be to promote Windows, since he;s been around long enough to know that it's OS that made MS what it is. If he were to act on that, I wonder whether he'd cancel the cross-platform heretics, or whether he'd simply Fox them, or whether he'd get them all wound up in turmoil and disillusionment. After all, as long as people buy the OS, MS's aspirations still can be met.

Another consideration that has not been mentioned is that Microsoft's other cash dow is Office, which I bet it has not been rewritten in .NET, either.

I agree with you that Ballmer is unlikely to stand up to the cash cows in defense of any technology. Unlike Bill Gates, he does not come from a gearhead background. He is a Harvard MBA who started out selling soap for Procter and Gamble.