I agree with you up to a point. If we didn't have SOME kind of a standard or direction, how would anything interop? We would have hundreds of different companies doing their own things and each computer would have to accomodate for each one.

Ecspecially with this transition towards building "web solutions" instead of desktop applications, the world would be in chaos. Everytime you went to a website, you would have to download that companies run-time engine to be able to view their page (we can't just regress to a world of nothing but html).

While I agree that on one extreme (like adding "common" to intellesense to keep people from getting lost and saying "hmm, wonder what that does?" from time to time), IDEs are over friendly and way too easy. But on the other extreme, where do we say "ok, this is abstract enough to be used universally, but defined enough to interoperate without issue."