Microsoft are Doomed by Open Source

Jobs for Microsoft skills are losing market share. Microsoft has lost the hearts of developers. It's not surprising as MS killed VB, slaughtered Silverlight and now are moving .NET to legacy in favour of Win 8 "Apps" where MS can cream off their 30% from their own "App store". MS also alienated devs with it's destruction of Borland and its dirty tactics in the browser wars. A war that led to zero innovation for five years until open source saved the day. Devs have cursed IE 5 and 6 and moved to Mozilla and now Google browsers.

Open source is now legit in Enterprises and in fact is, in many cases, best of class. Linux (servers, Android and on desktop but it's losing that battle), Firefox and Chrome, Hadoop, and also the LAMP stack including Apache / nginx / PHP (PHP is the exception - it sucks), Python, Perl and Mysql / PostgreSql / DB2 etc. Also there is Java - which is wrongly criticised on this site, it's open source, as are many Java frameworks and libs, all heavily used in the Enterprise, where Java is a perfect fit. These are serious areas, open source, history will show, has had an enormous disruptive effect on IT.

Microsoft is still a closed-source dinosaur, it attacks open source with patent attacks these days. Devs do not like those dirty tactics. And so MS declines into a patent troll company. Which, even 5 years ago, seemed almost inconceivable to most.