Having started my training as a programmer in the 90s with 16 bit Visual Basic 4 and having seen them at their worst on several occasions, it’s often easy for me to take the side of people who don’t like the company (except Apple fanboys, because their platform has exhibited a lot of bad, anti-competitive and destructive behavior of late as well and more recently). I’ve seen them destroy competitors, build up a huge userbase on a platform that made building applications easy and then torch it on the altar of progress, and even keep security-hole-riddled crap around for years that caused compromised systems and grief for users for decades. Consequently, I’ve tried on numerous occasions to switch to linux, and ended up coming back to windows (usually after some config file got hosed and cost me a day of work). I’ve lived through ODBC database access, DAO, RDO, ADO, ADO.NET, Linq-to-Sql, and Entity Framework (whose early versions drove me to use NHibernate). I’ve seen ActiveX in the browser, VB webclasses, silverlight, and even FoxPro. I’ve even used Visual Source Safe…. I’ve essentially had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft for a very long time.