>> I would say the Marketers and Sales run the show and strategy now at MS rather than ENgineers...
>
>Even in the marketing area m$ is far behind ... just take a look at m$ ads compared to Apple's

Not to mention startups. Almost all web startups would rather use PHP, Python, or RoR (and just on Linux, not some toned down version on windows - which should be even more troubling to MS) than ASP.NET. ASP.NET emulated Java and kept at it until the recently announced Razor/Matrix stuff. Now it's catch up all over again. VB6 or even VFP could have played some role here being interpreted and/or weakly/dynamically typed languages like all the popular open source ones.