>I'll give you that. They don't necessarily play a fair game. But then again the whole freaking IT boom of the 90's sits on top of their OS, and they are ruthless about protecting their share.

What are you talking about? The IT boom wasn't so much about Visual Studio programming languages as it was networks and the internet. MS doesn't have hardly any hand in networking hardware. And it was mostly legacy systems that called for the growth of new programmers. Yeah, MS brought the PC to your mom's house because Apple got stingy, but you give them way too much credit for growth. The majority of internet servers out there are powered by Apache unix machines.