Ed,

You made some damn good points there. Even Microsoft's critics usually grant that they are strategic marketing geniuses, and your insight here shows that it is even more impressive when you dig under it a little.

Of course they may have just set the ball in motion and took the opportunities as they came, but strategic genius's in any area (Chess, War, Risk, whatever) are often working at the intuition level, and not the concrete plan level. Regardless, this still drives home the idea that Bill Gates is a strategic genius.

Cool, stuff man, I really mean it, I read that aloud to my wife, and was saying "yes! he's dead on with this!"

I especially liked how you addressed the technological issues. The issue isn't really technical, but we as coders think it must be. But it never has been with MS, and yet at a deeper level it becomes technical again. We *have* gotten easy access to COM, we *have* gotten more robust shell scripting, and it bugs us because at some level we *want* that stuff to be hard, so we can be elite. Not because it has to be, but because we know what's going on under the hood, and it irks some of us that the unwashed masses can write n-tier apps--maybe not as cleanly, not with as much control, maybe not even understanding that they are, but they can--and we don't like it, because we worked hard to understand why, we liked learning why, and I for one get annoyed when someone doesn't care.

I don't think I am alone, in fact I think it is this that drives a lot of the religious ferver concerning VB--and not just among VFP people--I got news for anyone who doesn't follow the rest of the programming world, not only VB but VFP, Visual Studio, and everything MS is often seen in EXACTLY the same way VFP'ers view VB--anyone ever read the MCP jokes at slashdot? Not because Linux is somehow the be-all end all, but because VS and VB and Windows is not their stuff, so its wrong. BSD people say it about Linux, and so on, and on.

The answer of course is what everyone is recommending, and trying to do--learn the new stuff. For me, Perl gets my vote as the most fun language, scripting or not (probably because its easy AND you can still see what's going on for real, to quote Larry Wall, "It makes the easy things easy, and hard things possible."), but that isn't why people pay us to write code--it might be why we do it, but not why they pay us. So we, like the nomads of old, go where the herds are--not because we are cattle, but because we have to eat.

For those of us who like the low level stuff, it might seem strange to not *want* the control that goes with it, but for those who started with VB, they love that its easy, and they are being more rational than we are with our really rational technical arguments why it sucks. They are just getting the job done.

An example: I just had a discussion with a very good VB programmer today about this same topic. She said she didn't like Tables in HTML because they were flat, she wanted a grid type control available within ASP apps to put on the screen. We laughed because I feel just the opposite, I *like* that its flat--not because an object wouldn't be great, but because I started out with CGI, and HTML via C, and Perl, and it's comforting to me to know what's really going on--but she prefers QUAD (I like that BTW) because the customer wants the stuff now--not when she gets done writing some custom COM object to render VFP tables into HTML ones.

I told her about a COM example to do that at Rick Strahl's page, and she said "yeah, but *you* have to write the code.", I said "sure, but only once."

Somewhere in there is the difference.

Anyway this started as a compliment, and turned into my 4 cents, but again Great post man!

Best,
Bill