So, MS won't be dying anytime too soon. Too many people like me code to it.
Besides having marketshare, which is a force unto itself, MS is the only way for existing companies to have backwards compatibility with all of those software programs that they've been writing for their desktops since the mid 1980's.
Companies don't just abandon such investments in that level of software development.
MS also has a "farm team." MS developer tools are so easy to use that high school kids and college entrants have long been "playing" with MS tools. This creates a subset of people who are pre-disposed to use MS tools in the future, establishing yet another driving force for the Market.
And then there is cost. Techies don't like to think about real business costs. To most techies, "cost" is what a developer's software tools retail for.
On the other hand, most *businesses* are run by people who know that paying $80 grand per year to a programmer is a far larger cost than paying $1,000 to purchase a software tool. So if that software tool makes their programmer more efficient than 3 programmers who don't have that tool, then who is running the more efficient business: the company that hires 3 programmers and requires them to use "free" software tools, or the firm that hires 1 programmer and pays the $1,000 for the software tool?!
So there is your *real* cost, a fact known by all but the most myopic techies (who will still rant idiotically about the price of software tools).