> ...I'm not saying that we didn't land on the moon,
  > I'm just saying it's interesting to wonder if it
  > really happened.

  > If you haven't noticed, I've been part of this
  > community for quite a while.

[1] Though I agree that completely abandoning C# would be suicide in the enterprise market.

Conspiracy theories are just speculation too. One could argue that the US government has a history of all kinds of activities and thus many of the current conspiracies are in keeping with history. The essence of a conspiracy theory is speculation not grounded in evidence or probability.

I'm not sure that 'pulling rank' is necessarily constructive either. It just reminds me of those Slashdot threads where people with increasing smaller UIDs would reply with, "You must be new here," or "get off my lawn."

My comment was directed quite clearly at the insinuation that I was speaking on behalf of Microsoft, which I do not do.

I may have been snarky, but only because I see this quite a lot on HN -- that people are the company they work for. We're just members of this community like any other.

Granted, I don't follow the Microsoft development community closely, so there may be something that I'm missing out on, but I don't see it to be as 'out there' as claiming vast conspiracy theories surrounding historical events.

I also don't think that being signed up for a site for a longer duration of time inherently gives you any right to speak for the entire site, even in a conversation with one of relatively less "seniority" on the site (whatever that even means). It's nice that you clarified what you meant by "us" but that wasn't being debated and it didn't add to any points you've made.