I'm sure they're trying, pragmatically, to solve the problem of providing the self-contained .NET development experience to the effort of creating web animation

I'm sure they're trying, pragmatically, to solve the problem of providing the self-contained .NET development experience to the effort of creating web animation and RIA. Market share is part of it, but they've always succeeded in having a committed developer base by providing fairly comprehensive tools that make everything feel somewhat like Visual Basic (which they do remarkably well). I would argue that such an approach is what makes me very queasy around ASP.NET, but that's another story.