Not to go too far, but Microsoft is probably used by most people out there

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

So if we're going to build new applications that require a large time investment, like say movie editing - today that doesn't matter for the enterprise desktop, but eventually it will when we get closer to consumers - you really need to have a cross-platform story.

We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux.

We cannot choose one desktop over the other - Gnome or KDE - because there's users for both code bases.

Well Microsoft really does develop some really interesting technology.

With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time.