It depends. Have you ever heard of legacy public employees; children of parents in the same work, fire fighters, police, administrators, etc? They certainly feel as if they are owed, parent and child alike.
Again, it's ironic that this is phrased in free market terms if indeed it is true that Microsoft rigged the market, itself, in Windows. Isn't it true that they purposely cripple the public documentation of their products in order to provide a marginal advantage to those paying for training programs and seminars, who then further act to their employers as a sales staff for Microsoft products? If so, the further joke might be on them. The actual free market seems to be slowly inching away from Microsoft. When Win 3.1 hit for the use of Truetype and legacy compatibility, with the newest Mosaic browser written for Windows, it seemed a great solution and product for all business and niche users. But now Microsoft is seen as oppressive, incompetent, dangerous in some way for lack of security measures, etc. And that incompetence and seeming lack of concern for customers is, I think, precisely the opposite of the sense in the early 80s when Win 3.1 basically launched, or relaunched, the company. I think their thinking has become ever more twisted. And I do think that Gates constant fear that another company is gaining on him is justified in 2005.
Learn/use a language with those concepts, and then you can port your skills to the next 'latest, greatest' language-du-jour.
I've been working in Java full time for over 8 years now. Because of my abilities with OO and the 3-tiered world, I've actually been offered .NET architecture jobs several times. And when something better than Java comes along I'll have skills that will still be marketable (from my experience, I do *not* believe that .net fits in this catagory, but YMMV).