It is Microsoft's job, as a heartless and monopolistic corporation, to fool the public into thinking it wants something it doesn't need.

I would say the vast majority of professional coders out there know very little about programming or the history of computing in general; they will be at the mercy of a company that knows how to bait them and advertise to them with gimmicks that "new" languages can offer.

Microsoft will continue to release new languages and do everything in their legal power to inhibit native support for anything that competes with spaces they operate in (browser support for Hotmail, language support in browsers, HTML compatibility, blah blah).

Are you forgetting already that Microsoft once added into their operating system a scanner that uploaded information about everything you had on your hard drive (this was eventually removed from Windows 95 after journalists discovered this with beta editions and a community uproar assisted MS in changing their minds)?

You can help! Just be a professional. Speak out when someone is doing something excessively stupid - like using a MS exclusive technology when many existing technologies are available that are more powerful, more efficient, better known, more portable, etc etc.