Is it going backwards? I'm not sure about that. I think that PWS, and Python, are actually moving forward by bridging some of the programming concepts that were missing in DOS. It's more like making a korn or C-shell for the Windows world.

The big thing for me is that the tools have to be built in. When I'm recovering a server, or rebuilding one, I like having stuff built into the OS and stack. Or easily integrated into an install. PWS does this on newer systems, and as those become mainstream, it becomes more likely that PWS is available.

VBS works well for me, and the big reason I moved away from Perl is that I could always count on VBS being on every server.