A lot of MS software design has been historically clueless about network latency, I'll grant you that. I sometimes joke about imagining a world where the web is built on top of DCOM, where the view in your browser is rendered via object-oriented RPC calls from the server, etc.<p>Apple are a much more insidious threat, though, in my opinion. One of the reasons I first got into programming was because one of the first computers I got didn't have any I/O other than the keyboard, the monitor and speakers - the tape drive was broken. A flashing BASIC prompt (ultimately MS licensed) greeted me at every power-on. The only way I could do anything with the machine was to write the program myself; and I could keep nothing of what I wrote, and had to write it all again if I wanted it again. Every night I wrote an alarm-clock program to wake me up in time for school the next morning.<p>Now if I were that age again today, and had an iPhone or iPod touch in my pocket, or god forbid an iPad in my bag, I couldn't even write a program on it, much less save it on the local file system. Apple is almost intrinsically hostile to software engineers, as I see it. Developers are like rodents to be trapped by promises of a slice of market willing (and hopefully forced) to pay for software; but the trap is far tighter than anything MS has ever lain.