Any developer with a memory would be quite mistrustful of this "crusade", if any. Microsoft's pump and dump of technology stacks just plain hurts; the way they

Any developer with a memory would be quite mistrustful of this "crusade", if any. Microsoft's pump and dump of technology stacks just plain hurts; the way they just made COM/DCOM nearly invisible by deleting the MSDN support pages and replacing them with .NET to force developers onto .NET was not pleasant. Granted, .NET was / is awesome (and if you were serious, your firm would have the relevant version of MSDN installed locally). (I recently heard about something similar happening with Silverlight, but I am not sure. It was genuinely exciting when Silverlight was launched and it's features in comparison to Flash were trumpeted quite a bit at that time. Now : it's just silently gone). You never know when the rug gets pulled from underneath your feet with any Microsoft technology. Let's say they get convinced that the next big thing is some form of Intentional Programming. They are not going to do a graceful transition from .NET to IP. They'll suddenly remove all references to the Old Thing on site:microsoft.com and all you'll see is the New Thing, trumpets blaring. This is psychologically difficult for a developer who has invested years, not just months, learning the Old Thing. The same attitude is visible with how the Metro UI is being shoved down my visual pathways with Win 8. A related but often tacit issue is that the pace of change in technology is actually a vehicle for age discrimination. All of us do it at some level ("Good God, COBOL on the resume?! What is this, 1979?"), but I think that the lack of graceful transition from older technologies to newer ones by large firms makes it institutionalized. You have to choose your skillset carefully; the human mind cannot simply absorb ALL of COBOL, C++, Java, Ruby, SQL and NoSQL! Or it can, but you're sacrificing something, maybe even personal memories, in order to hold technical knowledge.