Hi Grant

you say

"Though Steve Balmer is definitely not my favorite person in the world, he is right about one thing: Developers, Developers, Developers. How does he attract developers? He makes it as easy as possible for developers to write code for his platform. Microsoft development environments are some of the easiest to use, even for beginning programmers. Many programmers write code almost exclusively for the Windows platform simply because the integrated development environment (IDE) of the Visual Studio products was so easy to learn when they first got started."

I agree with you on the first line - Steve Ballmer or Microsoft cannot be the favorite of anyone working in education - since education is all about peer learning, collaborating and sharing, the very antithesis of knowledge proprietisation, and knowledge proprietisation is the foundational principle of proprietary sotware

the rest of your para is refuted by a recent report in New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/technology/05so...

"Meanwhile, young technology companies today rely on free, open-source
business software rather than Microsoft’s products, so young students,
soon to be looking for jobs, have embraced open-source software as well.

“Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge
software developers,” said Tim O’Reilly, who publishes a popular line of
software development guides.

In a way it is good for education... that we are moving towards collaboratively created, freely shareable software - since free sharing and collaborative co-construction are foundational principles of education.

More and more people and institutions are adopting FOSS due to these reasons - visit http://public-software.in/taxonomy/term/15
regards
Guru