Any competent and well-informed programmer knows that the openness of C#/.NET is a total sham. Sure the core is open, but there's so many Windows-only extensions that it's virtually impossible to make cross-platform apps. Plus the fact that the Mono implementation is always waay behind Microsoft's.

But MS has been very clever. They know that it's only technical people who can see this; the rest will just get the subliminal message that ".NET is now also cross-platform, just as Java".

This is the real damage of Mono. Its existence provides the right excuse for PHB and clueless tech decision-makers to sway the decision towards .NET instead of Java, because, "hey, Microsoft is also cross-platform now".

It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is

It's hard to make the average person understand just how useless this is when you hit the memory wall.

However, it is fair to say that IBM still build machines whose memory subsystems scale waaay better that anything in PC-land.