Why? How is an application accessing Google services limiting my choices or affecting my productivity? Both were effects of the Microsoft monopoly.

Unlike Microsoft in its salad days, Google doesn't have an anti-competive monopoly clause built into your hardware. You can buy a computing device without Google and still interact with the rest of the world. Comparing Google to Microsoft at this point is specious.

... was the biggest digital crime of my era.

I was going to post the same sentiment, without the maybe. Of course, your post lost a little credibility, since you posted as AC. ;-)

Shlaer-Mellor / Executable UML have been offering this type of language independence for over 20 years. The method works from business to embedded software. All that's required is model compiler support for the target language, which can be bought off the shelf or made in-house. Currently model compilers exist for C, C++, Java, Ada, System C, and I'm sure there's more that I haven't encountered.

Try well over 30 years old. MVC came out in the 70s.

The top 10% isn't all in Silicon Valley. Only whatever percentage has the mobility and desire to live there. If companies want to really access the whole of the top 10%, then they have to explore telecommuting options.

I must be getting old.

I thought by MS-Windows like, they meant it crashed or hung a lot.

You're an idiot. OS/2 ran circles around anything Microsoft produced back then. The Amiga and NEXT were certainly viable alternatives. Microsoft's abusive monopoly was the only reason it's OS survived past the 90's. If you need a citation, go look up the findings of fact in the antitrust case. Microsoft was born due to antitrust action and they should have died due to antitrust action.

Microsoft isn't going to complain about those. WP users are supposed to use Microsoft email/calendar functionality. Microsoft has never been about choice, as was clearly illustrated in the initial antitrust findings.

I've never understood the point of SharePoint. Maybe I've never seen it implemented properly, but I don't see how a company could come up with a valid cost/benefit justification for it. OTOH, marketing promises and the lure of moving all IT to low-cost sites probably makes it very attractive to corporate heads; (often unmeasured) worker productivity be damned.

The business market is going to be scared away by a GUI? Give me a break! If they've put up with instability, vulnerability, and continuous UI changes, they certainly aren't going to be put off by another UI change. They willingly put their heads in the guillotine by adopting YA3GL (C#/.NET) that gives no advantages unless you want to do things the Microsoft way, and if they are that far gone, they'll adopt the Windows 8 interface at some point.

The only way Microsoft will save itself is to learn how not to be Microsoft. The monopoly power is starting to wane. Even playing the old Win32 games with the .NET platform won't work too much longer.

I found Visual Studio to be lacking compared to Eclipse. When you factor in the cost and portability concerns, I don't know why anyone (except maybe a Windows-only programmer) would choose Visual Studio.

Microsoft's standard business model has always been to leverage their monopoly in the PC market to reduce competition. Intel and AMD are still heavily invested in the PC market, so Microsoft has a lot of influence over them. It's too bad Judge Jackson's remedies didn't stand.