The author also conveniently ignored the fact that a lot of those applications exploded on the PC market partly because the PC's were so much more advanced. Ap

The author also conveniently ignored the fact that a lot of those applications exploded on the PC market partly because the PC's were so much more advanced. Apple didn't lose all those developers because of freedom, those developers were after customers, and it's hard to convince customers to buy your product when you tie them to the high-priced and technologically backward option. The reality is that Apple fears competition. It's never been able to handle any competition. When NuTech cloned the mac, Apple sued them into oblivion. When Apple start the clone program, the clones sold better machines... so Apple killed the program. When Apple bought eMagic and Nothing Real, it killed off the Windows version of both, because no one in their right mind would choose Apple's platform for such compute-intensive applications when it was so technologically behind the rest of the industry (except Sun, who was even farther behind). So when buying a mac meant buying a vastly inferior machine, Apple lost a LOT of customers (including most of the high end film and visual FX industry, who went Linux + x86), largely because of the inferiority of the platform. Today, the mac isn't an inferior platform, it's an identical platform. (I'm talking under the hood, not the ergonomics and OS.) If Apple were smart, they'd be emphasizing their platform, and encouraging developers by doing the exact opposite of what they're doing. By continuing to support .NET, Apple would be making it easier for developers to make the transition to the iPhone and iPad. Sure, they'd get lots of generic apps, but they already have a huge pile of crud with a few gems here and there, and the better .NET developers who want their apps to success will put in the effort to make their apps iPad/iPhone/OSX compliant in order to better serve their users.