That's not much of a surprise! Microsoft has always done a great job with their APIs. Great documentation and code samples, not to mention excellent support. Most recently I have done some work with the Live Alerts SDK and the support staff was a pleasure to work with!

When I was doing game development many developers chose OpenGL without question, however the DirectX team managed to pull ahead and become the de facto standard for the Windows platform and I'm sure Microsoft will pull off the same with web technology and services!

Your blog look got disturbed.. Please do some thing about it

I am not an expert of Google/Yahoo/Facebook APIs, however I have above average experience (enought to evaluate the good and the bad of a system) with those systems and I agree with the EDC report.

Generally speaking, when it comes to development (no matter will it be desktop or web dev), no other company comes close to Microsoft. In particular, Microsoft .NET is an absolutely fantastic development platform and Visual Studio is a #1 tool.

I'm with Matt and George. No one nurtures developers like Microsoft. IMO it's the primary key to their success. And I love it when MS feels a twitch in its spider web-- we get fun new toys. Windows Live is clearly superior in functionality and extensibility to anything else out there. I'm not being religious, just reaching an accurate conclusion based on the facts. The title of the EDC should have been "Well Duh".