From a developer perspective, I like a lot of the ways that Microsoft is heading, especially concerning web development. Despite the bad press they get for many consumer products (think Vista's poor adoption rate, XBox 360 hardware failures, and the lackluster Zune), they have a lot of exciting development tools both existing and upcoming. This may be the naive fan-boy in me talking, but I also like the more open and progressive attitude they're taking on many fronts. Here's an excerpt from a recent post by Scott Guthrie about the new ASP.NET MVC framework:
Last month I announced that the .NET Framework source code can now be downloaded and debugged. Ultimately once it ships the ASP.NET MVC framework will be available via this mechanism as well (just like the rest of the ASP.NET source code).
Starting with this next preview, we are also going to make the ASP.NET MVC Framework source code downloadable as a buildable VS project solution. This will enable you to easily view and debug the ASP.NET MVC Framework source code. We are also going to include a license that permits you to optionally make patches to the ASP.NET MVC Framework source code in the event that you run into a bug in an application you are developing with it.
The license won't enable you to redistribute your patched version of ASP.NET MVC (we want to avoid having multiple incompatible ASP.NET MVC versions floating around and colliding with each other). But it will enable developers who want to get started building ASP.NET MVC applications immediately to make progress - and not have to worry about getting blocked by an interim bug that they can't work around.
It's good to hear that coming from a prominent manager and the co-creator of ASP.NET.