.net was obsoleted in 2005? DirectX was obsoleted in 1997? Microsoft like any other company kills under performing products, fortunately they usually replace them with something better. When managed direct X got the ax it was replaced with XNA. when VB got the ax it was replaced with .net. Sometimes you have to admit something was a bad idea, kill it and do better next time.
I think the issue people have is that in the last decade (roughly), Microsoft has been releasing technological stacks in great fanfare, promoting them as the be-end end-all of everything and killing them on a 2~3 years cycle. WebForms, WPF, Silverlight, MDX, DWM/Aero seem deprecated by Metro, ... and I remember about a billion data-access frameworks which got the ax every 6 months or so.
XNA survives for now (it's barely 4 years old, still has the time to die), but that might be because it's part of the XDK (will it survive the transition to MS's next console?), but apart from .Net itself there's little which endured, and the more these technologies were initially heralded as saviors the earlier they got shitcanned.
