You would argue that they aren't? In the past, the biggest motivations to do web development with J2EE technologies were that J2EE was free and that Microsoft didn't really offer anything of substance. Now, Microsoft offers .NET express for free and leverages their VB API for web development.

If you want to develop in Java, you have to download the Java SDK, download a compatible JRE, make sure your users have a compatible JRE, download Eclipse, download Eclipse plugins, download a framework (Spring, Struts, etc), download more Eclipse plugins for the framework, configure Eclipse, download different JRE/SDK because you discover yours don't support your Eclipse, make your users get a new JRE, download Apache or Tomcat, download more plugins for Eclipse to be compatible with these servers, setup your project XML's, download Ant and its plugins for Eclipse, create an Ant Build script, write the javascript/html for "hello world" and then cross your fingers that it all goes right when you build the project and launch the web server. Then, you get to write all the manual code for reading from a text box.

If you want to develop in .NET, you download .NET Express, make sure you and your users are running the .NET runtime, and you're all set. If you want a text box, you simply drag and drop it, and the API takes care of generating all the business and GUI logic you have to write manually in Java.

The biggest reason that people opted to hassle with approach number 1 is that it was free where Microsoft wasn't. Now, Microsoft has a solid API and charges you nothing to develop, which severely undercuts the motivation to hassle with J2EE setup. Now, we're back to traditional *NIX vs Microsoft issues - do we want cross platform capability, do we want to bundle and distribute as an OEM, do we want to pay for OS, etc.

So, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that they didn't score a major victory with .NET. They stopped hemorrhaging developers with its release. And, development technology dictates the rest of the brand adoption in the market.

That's a Catch 22. It would, if they didn't dominate the market. But, if they didn't dominate the market, they wouldn't have the leverage or motivation to generate all that proprietary stuff. Open source stuff finds a niche in being flexible, but it's also hampered by it. Supporting X different kinds of hardware and OS API is X times harder and more time consuming than doing it for one. Which means, Microsoft cranks out shit X times faster and X times better, pound for pound.

Uh, okie-dokie. I don't really go in for fan-boy shit. I'm in this to make money.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson