Re: Dear microsoft guy...
Seems a bit of a straw man argument..
As someone who has eschewed the Windows platform for over a decade, I take your wider point that it's a bit much to blame the Microsoft of today for the Microsoft of yesterday, and really what else can they do but try to do better.
As a developer, I welcome the appearance of openness from Redmond, but they lost mindshare so comprehensively that *today* open sourcing .Net is not enough to buy them any credibility.
If you are only targeting Windows, sure thing .Net will do the trick, but if you want cross platform code, the only sane way is C or C++ in my opinion - where an actual specification exists and the language and runtime behaviour is well specified, with multiple interoperable implementations.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
