> But they've been the best for developers. Microsoft has screwed developers on their own platforms too, when they didn't fall 100% in lockstep with Microsoft'

> But they've been the best for developers. Microsoft has screwed developers on their own platforms too, when they didn't fall 100% in lockstep with Microsoft's whimsical decisions and about-turns. > Best dev tools, most powerful and widely deployed OS I strongly disagree they built the best dev tools or the "most powerful and widely deployed OS", but I'm going to talk about a more important point here. There's a difference between making a product that is better that everything else, and preventing others from making a product better than yours. When you let one maker — irrespective of whether they make the best product or not — bully and cheat their way into preventing other makers from competing, you are and shall be left with a sub-par product. One example: Microsoft single-handedly held back the web for close to a decade, all so it could continue to sell Windows licenses. As a result, the world suffered. There's a lot of progress that was stifled and/or killed off — some of which we may never get again — by Microsoft, just to protect its OS, by abusing its position on the market. It wasn't their dev tools or their "most powerful and widely deployed OS" that made them infamous, it was their own actions.