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>>Ten years ago, just after MS merged with Fox Holdings, some of the Fox support people spoke at my user group in North Carolina. They stated that eventually, developer tools would share common code. One form designer. One report designer. One runtime. That was ten years ago!!! .NET has been an available product for less than a year. Sounds like lots of R&D to me.
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>That's right! "It sounds to you". It's not a fact.

It is a fact that MS has stated they will take some of their billions in the bank and use it on R&D. Being that .NET is the future of MS (until their next future comes around), a good chunk of that money will go into .NET R&D.