The corporate-owned, single-vendor product angle is a debatable point.
Couldn't you say that about --- hmm, lessee --- C being started at Bell
Labs, Smalltalk being started at Xerox PARC, Java being started at Sun,
etc.? Plenty of languages were started by companies and weren't
collaborative FOSS. That doesn't mean they are inherently flawed or
unworthy of consideration because of that. Now Microsoft being behind
languages such as C# and whatnot could restrict platform implementation
to Windows only. But then again look at Mono. Plus with Microsoft's
WPF/E the intent is to deploy .NET to a variety of devices, not just
Windows PC's. There will be a WPF/E plug-in for web browsers such as
Safari, Mozilla, Opera, etc.

Paul Lutus wrote:
> 
>  Not remotely. It has its roots in Visual Basic, which Microsoft abandoned a
>  few years ago in its zeal to sell a different, newer language to all its
>  loyal adherents. VBA will suffer the same fate in time, because it is owned
>  by a corporation whose goal is to sell new products to old customers.
> 
>  VBA is not a very good model for teaching programming principles, and it is
>  important to remember it is a single-vendor product, one that will rise or
>  fall with that vendor's fortunes. Also Microsoft has no incentive to
>  cooperate with third parties -- those will good long-term recall will
>  remember the brouhaha surrounding Microsoft and Java.
>   
>  -- 
>  Paul Lutus
>  http://www.arachnoid.com