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I made sure to read all the way throgh to the end of your article before posting my response.
Simply put. Nothing hapens by accident.
Consider the timing of BASIC's disapearanse from Redmond.
It didn't hapen when the GUI was added (Even Windows 3.11 ran on a version of DOS that includes BASIC).
It didn't happen when the OS booted to the GUI by default and made getting to a command prompt awkward. Windows 95, 98 and ME all include BASIC on the CD.
It didn't happen when they went to 32 Bit programing. Windows NT had BASIC available.
Nope. It vanished when they realised that the greatest threat to the growth in profits came from hobby programmers, writing open source software. A significant portion of those hobbyists are people who learned to program and enjoy programing. However they are payed to do something else.
How do you fight that? One way is to reduce the number of trained programmers and the number of people exposed to programing in any way. With a small supply of available talent those companies who already have the cash to employ the majority Computer Science graduates will have a substantial long term advantage.
Or maybe I am just a conspiracy nut and the lords of IT just can't be bothered to maintain something that "nobody uses" (like BASIC) when they have cool new stuff to work on (Like the 2 person version of Solitaire, allegedly shipping with Windows Vista ;)
