It's easy to blame management for shifting focus to enterprise software, but they had to try doing something new.
"In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft." "Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the language C#."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000
1997: "Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."
I learned Windows programming on-the-job using Delphi and then thought I should investigate a "more common" C++ environment (I already knew console-based C++). Learning that _Visual_ C++ had no similar RAD environment was really shocking. My resource editor isn't attached to an an automatic code generator? Say what?
After that experience with Visual C++, I'd assumed Microsoft did roughly the same thing with "Visual C#" and never gave it a more than cursory look. I also had the fear that this new .NET thing would be yet another technology they hype then deprecate. What's the official Windows GUI framework this month? Is it Win32 Or maybe MFC? Or was it WPF or WinForms or some new XAML thing? (Sorry, went off on a tangent there...)