Microsoft is a marketing company with programmers. Name an MS product outside of the base Windows OS (all versions of which were based on something else, too) and there is a company that Microsoft bought to acquire the product. And as you point it it's usually in response to a technologically superior product. And history shows those they cannot acquire, who refuse their advances or who let MS in the door before the purchase agreement was done (i.e "joint venture") get soundly squished. I'm often accused of being Anti- anything Windows but that's not the case as I actually like several MS products. But I won't use them unless I have no alternatives or cannot be competitive with those alternatives. This is rather symptomatic of the problems we face in America - we refuse to punish bad behavior if we can benefit from it ourselves.