Microsoft's secret weapon agains competitors has been its symbiosis with a support class of computer professionals (MCSE, MCP, MCSD, etc.), who acted as an unpaid salesforce and kept their employers safely within the MS product suite.
Microsoft's products are intentionally inferior, in order to give the support class some reason to exist. (Employers need the support class, and the class in turn has a set of manageable tasks and technical assistance in those tasks from Microsoft.)
The cadre of external Visual Basic experts has served its purpose for MS, and can now go about its next task (selling real estate or home loans, I think).
Doesn't sound like such a secret. Does that also explain Microsoft's reluctance to publicly document its products, in any sufficient level of detail? These people, instead, pay for training and seminars that contain 'secret' documentation, tools, and the like? And abuse of the free market guarantees them work?
Fascinating that Microsoft would so often entertain free market arguments, but essentially have set up a pseudo-guild system with themselves as the company store.
Very interesting.