culubalo said:
Since when was this about the best platform for development? Anyway in my humble opinion best dev platform is linux...
If you enjoy continuously changing interfaces and hundreds of libraries to choose between that do the same thing (and might be abandoned at any moment). Don't forget the primitive GUI building/code generating tools (glade), stripped libraries (so you can't debug anything), poor (usually outdated and incomplete) developer documentation, and lack of a consumer desktop market for your software.
Compared to Mac OS X with Xcode (plus its NextStep heritage), and even Windows with Microsoft's developer tools (albeit, at high cost), Linux only excels at providing lots of different languages, libraries, and tools to play around with. Good for learning programming, but not as great for getting actual work done.
Granted I still use GNU Emacs for a lot of things (especially Lisp development), but I don't use Linux as my main development platform.
Anyway, it's hard for large companies to innovate. Even Apple has to buy out smaller companies with new ideas to create many of its "innovations" (e.g. iTunes is just a modified version of an earlier third-party product). It also takes years for new software projects to mature, especially when you add drastic new requirements to them (like adding multimedia features to Windows NT to eventually make XP).
It took five years for Mac OS X to mature into Mac OS X Tiger. That's with some of the brightest software developers working with an already complete and very high quality base of code from the NextStep OS.
Don't start making conspiracy theories about Microsoft just because you don't understand the nature of software development.