"Contrast with Apple. Steve Woz and Steve Jobs were burning the midnight oil assembling the Apple I to sell to consumers. Steve Woz was a programmer but the coding was incidental to making the Apple computer work. (E.g. his triumphant story of programming the floppy disk controller to work correctly.) They were selling end-user hardware and not a programmer's product like Microsoft. In 2011, none the top 3 guys (Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jony Ive) were programmers. Craig Federighi is an ex-programmer but Apple doesn't seem like the company that would hand the reigns over to him if Tim Cook stepped down. Craig is a powerful figure at Apple but obviously, he doesn't have the clout that Bill Gates did at Microsoft. The way Apple originated in 1976 had a ripple effect all the way to the present day in 2015. It guided their org structure and attitudes towards 3rd-party developers. As a consequence, we should expect blogs in 2015 complaining about their "hostility" towards developers. It's just the way Apple has always been."

Right, realistically if Cook were to step down tomorrow you would have to assume that Ive would get the call-up. I agree with your comments on Federighi. Eddy Cue doesn't seem to give off the right vibe. Phil Schiller doesn't really work - he's Marketing. Maybe the only other candidate would be Dan Riccio, who I'm surprised we don't see more of, and has largely shunned the limelight (or not been offered it) - VP of Hardware Engineering.

But very much so, while Visual Studio isn't without flaws, I think few could realistically claim that it hasn't been "the" IDE of note.