One of them says he went to a Microsoft Tech Ed Conference, where they say they're standardizing on C#, VBscript and something else I can't remember right now (probably Monad), and they specifically wanted to take away the hooks that were available for Perl in the past.

Your colleague is full of beans; don't let him near any machine you care about. I can only imagine how Microsoft will allow everyone from commercial companies and ISVs to shareware and freeware developers write applications of all kinds but not programming languages.