I appreciate your perspective, but I'm afraid you've just made my point. When developers run shops, they're notorious for producing a lot of things that look and feel great for developers but which don't meet the needs of a changing market ("Hey, why did we ever leave DOS? - We don't need all of that fancy User Interface nonsense! Any person with a brain can just memorize line commands..."). We don't need perfect buggy whips, but that's what we would have if carriage makers controlled the transportation industry. I think too that we're forgetting what Microsoft has given us: a dominant platform. I remember well the days of Atari, Commodore, Radio shack and others. Anyone who wrote software had to make it for numerous, diverse platforms. And if the company you're working for goes out of business, that's it. It's hard to find work when you're writing in languages that aren't supported anymore for hardware that doesn't exist. If Microsoft ever goes down (and it surely will someday) it will do so after moving computers from the labs of scientists and hobbyists into the hands of average people and after creating a lot of high-paying jobs for developers like us. When it does go down I hope we won't go back to the days of every-man-for-himself. Open source has the potential of taking us back there fast.