--
M$ has always been the complete opposite of the Macy's/Gimbels
situation. If Macy's didn't have it, they would
tell you to go to Gimbels, they have it. Now, Microsoft's
strategy is "Wait, we have it..." Six seconds later
they throw you a crappy rendition of what you really wanted,
while working on suffocating the company who may have
produced what you needed in the first place. Oh yeah,
then they dump a load of money into the company
they have brought to the brink of death to keep away those
pesky "monopoly" issues.

Hey, if we're really lucky maybe there will be an official M$ Perl-like
language that will be bundled for free with their OS.

Just look at the C# vs. Java issue - has anyone seen this?
C# is the inferior by-product of fallout between
MS and Sun because MS wanted proprietary extensions
to Java, and in fact provided them in J++
and thereby breaking the license agreement.

-Felonious