From an investor�s point, the Microsoft is in doom. Put it simple, they don�t know what they should to do next.
After 25 years, 80% of Microsoft �s revenue is still from OS system and Office package. And they decided to pay huge dividens to shareholders, that just say to shareholders:� hell get money and go somewhere.�
But it is in an advantage technology section. If they cannot find new direction, or invest in new things, they might be shutdown! All the their new products were not had very good responses from the market. Microsoft realized that I.T. Industrial is going to be a service industrial, they have to provide service to clients to survive. But why their users have to pay MS to fix MS�s bugs or secretly hole? And so far, there are no evidence to say .Net will be success, apart from it is Microsoft�s thing (I search for VB.Net and C# in Sydney there are total 18 jobs there, compare to
Java is 62)
The biggest problem as an investor I saw is Microsoft want to transfer from a manufacture (of software) to an I.T. service provider. It just like a furniture producer wants to be a car manufacture. God will know the results! If they are seriously with idea that they want to be a service provider, they should buy some very successful service providers instead of pay dividens to shareholders.
If MS cannot have enough revenue to float, all these existing MS products users will not have any further. If MS were gone one day and some hacker found a way to pay around with VB6 and all VB6 application users only could open their eyes big, and watched their VB6 application doing funky things after they log on Internet.
Personally, I like C#, just like Java.
