You could say that about most Microsoft APIs/platforms over the years. The key difference for me is that when it was Win16 -> Win32 and then COM/DCOM -> MFC ->

You could say that about most Microsoft APIs/platforms over the years. The key difference for me is that when it was Win16 -> Win32 and then COM/DCOM -> MFC -> ATL -> .NET -> etc. there weren't really many viable alternatives to deliver software to a large user base. That has all changed dramatically, and so it was important for MS to be very clear, and they weren't. Of course there are other factors as well: it used to be cheap to be an MS dev and then it got very expensive and is now back to cheap-ish again; they used to be the jeans and a t-shirt insurgent and now they're the big enterprise IT vendor, etc., etc.