Microsoft listens, even when you're not talking to them
See, Microsoft does listen. For all the crap MS catches about being arrogant or monopolistic or whatever, I tend to think they're humble and want to build products that customers actually want. I've read nonsense about how all this tool integration is designed to give the company a "stranglehold" on the market and lock people in or something like that, and I find that outright stupid. Put aside the fact that Microsoft is not a charity, but it behooves them to build stuff people want. How crazy is that?
I'm reading the Head First Design Patterns book (you know, the one with the cute barefoot blonde girl on the cover) right now. It's actually a Java book, but if you know C# you can mostly get it. While I bought the book to find something not dry and boring to formalize what I thought I already knew, as an aside I see more than ever how Java-like C# is. And I say, who cares? Java is C-like, so it's all evolutionary. I don't recall anyone at Microsoft ever saying, "We created this new thing that no one ever thought of."
I guess that tangent is just to comment that I still see people post stupid things like "M$" and hate on the company for no good reason other than it's fashionable. Microsoft does listen (unless you're a disgruntled non-evolving VB6 coder), and in a world where open source gets all kinds of press, you can be damn sure that Microsoft will continue to develop products people want. What alternative do they have? If they don't, they'll eventually die.