There are few technologies that I think could be invested in to get much more support from the HN crowd (whether they are well known to the HN crowd yet or not)

There are few technologies that I think could be invested in to get much more support from the HN crowd (whether they are well known to the HN crowd yet or not) * Singularity -- should be the basis of a new OS, maybe not to replace windows... but be the next windows. You're going to have to break backwards compatibility sometime, might as well start with a parallel OS * Intellipad -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd861709%28VS.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd861709%28VS.85%29.... I heard it would be something like emacs for .NET * opening .NET -- mono is really close but isn't yet as polished as to attract the thousands of .NET developers. Buying into the whole MS stack is too expensive for founders and small businesses but if development could be done on or in conjunction with open source environments, I imagine lots of Ruby (IronRuby), Python (IronPython), Java/Clojure (ClojureCLR) folks would be more willing to consider the market. * SharePoint is beloved by all enterprise companies but ALL developers laugh at it. Offer some kind of DLR API and I bet you could get lots of programmers more willing to support it. * Command line -- go ahead and support unix commands and a more unix-like shell. How could it hurt? * MSDN licenses are ridiculous and clearly only for big companies. Even startups that could start with BizSpark and ActionPack would rather use open source tools than be stuck in MSDN licensing hell. * drop the price of Windows Server 08 Core to better compete with Linux servers * start advertising better to non-enterprisey IT guys.