Paul Graham recently wrote a piece about how Microsoft is basically irrelevant to new developers--the tired old guard just isn't cutting edge. A Microsoft VP wrote back that all is well in Redmond.

Just as Stephen Jay Gould said we shouldn't blame the dinosaurs for being obsolescent--they lasted for hundreds of millions of years--we shouldn't be too hard on Microsoft. Being very popular means having a target audience of morons, so you add all these annoying features that help the stereotypical computer user, who seems to be unsure of everything he closes ("are you sure?"), or everything he opens ("may contain unsafe macros"). Excel and Word could probably be good programs if you took out 90% of the bloatware that seemed helpful to someone (clippy?). As my computer is now 100 times more powerful when I was in grad school, it's barely faster because my task manager tells me I have 30 programs running in the background, and every month or so I try to delete these bastards. If Bill Gates spent more money on vaccinating poor kids, and less on coding, it would probably be a good thing.

I remember a professor who was a good academic, but didn't get good reviews from his MBA students. The department chairman made him sit in on a professor who was not good academic, but got great reviews, thinking it would be helpful. But when the professor saw the lengths to which the popular professor dumbed down his material to be easy to digest, he simply said no thanks, I'll be unpopular. Clearly this can go to far, being popular isn't necessarily bad, as it forces you to communicate clearly, and non condescendingly, but it can easily go too far.