Microsoft's handle on language development (thanks to Anders Hejlsberg) is the best in the industry.

Thanks to Don Syme? F# surpasses C# as a language, and a lot of the CLRs power comes from proper generics. And Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell is pretty neat, isn't it)?

C#'s a nice contender against Java, but in my hindsight, it had an overly limited vision.

Are you saying that F# is a more radical departure from OCAML then C# is from Java?

C# is a pragmatic language. It never was about pushing boundaries.

Depends on who "us developers" is. Not all development is for Yet Another Corporate CRUD App (dressed up as some fancy groundbreaking tech). I'd argue they already have a significant presence in that particular "developer world" anyway. The vast majority of software run on enterprise desktop systems is Microsoft software, customized and extended in some cases by in-house (or contracted) development using the very walled-garden Microsoft suite of software/languages/compilers.

MS's offerings in that arena are at least as good as any other, if not superior, and I think far superior to the latest fad of (ab)using the web browser as a One Size Fits All application platform.

"Yet Another Corporate CRUD App (dressed up as some fancy groundbreaking tech)" - I think Ruby and Python are used for more then that, I think there is some sort of way of using them for mobile development as well, not the typical glorified web/HTML5 dev you are writing about.

In the past MS was very antagonistic towards open source and even open source projects within their own ecosystem. N-Hibernate and N-Unit come to mind as examples.

Why did this matter? Innovation is much faster and a lot cheaper with open source. Other platforms benefited and grew from it, and a lot of people left the MS ecosystem because it seemed to stagnate i.e. you have to re-invent a lot of wheels when staying in MS's world while all of that is already done and freely available to you on other platforms.

I'm not saying that MS hasn't changed their stance on open source (Codeplex is a prime example). I'm just telling the story of how MS lost traction with developers.

Coming from the open source world, I do not understand what you mean by friendlier. Can you ruminate a bit on this?