That's not surprising! Some really good enterprise and POS software got developed in Delphi (and other desktop frameworks/IDEs) back in the day. In Brazil a lot of businesses were starting to adopt POS, and having someone building a billing program for you was all the rage. There's little incentive to update such systems as long as they work. Not everything needs to be a website! (shakes walking stick and shouts to kids to get off his lawn)

I remember hating .NET in the beginning. Performance was abysmal and anything mildly low-level took a lot of work. I made some good money as a freelancer writing COM libraries or C++ libraries with a thin C# wrapper so that they could be used by companies that had bought into the whole .NET thing.

Then C# introduced generics, and it started breaking away from the similarities to Java. Things improved and in time .NET became a very capable runtime/framework. I'm actually excited to see Microsoft finally opening it up. As much as I love Python, the cloud and all the fancy new stuff we have nowadays, I occasionally long for the good old days when desktop software reigned supreme.

OK, better go to sleep now. I'm starting to sound like an old fogy :)