I started my familiarity with programming using a bunch of Micorosoft's products, but later was able to completely migrate away from them. Today, if I'm required to use a Microsoft's product, it's kind of like asking a North Korean who valiantly fought to get away from that cursed country to go back and live there again.
You see, my understanding of what's happening with MS is that their sales department is exceptionally successful, which lowers the requirements for everything else in the product. A particular quality of this sales department is that they rarely sell to individual end users: to be efficient, they sell to people who have absolute control over the end users, but are also incompetent when it comes to software. Think governments, hospitals, schools etc.
Another aspect of MS software is that they, internally, don't really allow anything that's not made by MS, and they are big enough for this policy to succeed. The unfortunate side effect of this policy is the Stockholm syndrome: MS developers not only get used to the MS tools, they genuinely seem to like the suffering incurred by using them. Another unfortunate side effect of this policy is that MS developers have no idea what normal users actually like. So, they are kind of like Bender (a robot, who has only a very faint idea of how humans eat) in the Futurama episode, where he enters a cooking contest. He then proceeds to put all kind of inedible components into his meals (but eventually wins by adding some LSD to the mix).
So... I will never touch any MS products with a ten feet pole, unless forced to by my employer. And if the employer goes as far as requiring me to use MS products a lot, I'll look for another place to work. My job today is quite meaningless, boring and I don't get to work with things I like or people I respect... but having to use MS tools for work would still be a lot, lot worse. It's a kind of a torture... well, of course, it's an exaggeration: it doesn't cause me physical pain, but it's a kind of frustration that makes me want to punch a wall every few seconds.
And to top it: using C# for anything is kind of like... starting a cooking recipe with "put a handful of chopped garlic into the pen". You just know it's either a mistake, or a prank, or total incompetence. You just don't keep reading after that line: there are plenty of recipes around, it's not worth your time to try to figure out why this one is defective.
I've never been able to understand the "other" side, even though I've talked to many people at various levels of the hierarchy at MS and similar organizations. With the rank-and-file folks, my impression was usually that they are pretty clueless about the org they work for, and if it came to discussing their allegiance to the org, they would often act like radical political activists.
With the higher-ups... I had this weird feeling they weren't really humans. Not that they ever had to be honest with me or had to even pretend to care about me. I only met such people in the work setting (outside of one time when I got invited to a Bar Mitzva because the email was sent to the entire company and then I was the only idiot to show up at the event since everyone else knew better it wasn't intended for my kind of people :D)
I honestly cannot imagine the thought process of someone like that, or what do they do on a weekend, or how do they interact with people of their own social class. Some weird stuff about these kind of people is that often times they'd dress like a "simple person", but once you have a closer look at their jeans / t-shirt / sneakers, it'd be something that looks "plain" but in fact not even sold in the place a regular person shops for clothes because it costs like ten times the price of a similarly looking item.
So... how do they do that? How do they justify doing what they do? -- It's honestly easier for me to try on the shoes of a religious fanatic or a hardcore criminal than to get any insight into the minds of these people. One common explanation is sociopathy, but it looks like these people aren't really it: they have friends, get married, have children, and, personally, they don't kill others, not anymore than an average person would. They just have the ability to completely ignore the negative and widespread consequences of their decisions. Something I'd be terrified of out of my mind to the point I'd not be able to close my eyes at night.
