You've probably seen old "programs" (I use the term loosely) written in GW-BASIC or BASICA. They are crap. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, BASIC actually stands for Beginner's All-purpose System for Innovating Crap (Symbolic Instruction Code my ass!). The GW-BASIC interpreter encouraged crappy poorly-written uncommented spaghetti code compressed into as few lines as possible.
The abomination known as BASIC has ruined countless potential Open Source programmers. Teenagers who learned "programming" via BASIC are stunted for life; many are unable to advance beyond being an MSCE. These BASIC-heads have to unlearn everything they know in order to write structured programs (much less anything Object Oriented!), a feat many cannot master.
Item: BASIC has screwed over countless future programmers with its unstructured "syntax".
Item: Microsoft has shipped brain-dead BASIC interpreters with MS-DOS, and most recently, with Office in the form of a macro language.
Obvious Conclusion: Microsoft has been conspiring to rid the computer industry of programming talent, most likely in a fiendish plot to ruin its future competition (read: Open Source software).
More advanced versions of BASIC that shipped with MS-DOS 5+ (QBASIC) and with Office (Visual Basic for Applications) are still brain-dead. These "modern" interpreters are merely a ruse to obfuscate Microsoft's sinister plans for programming domination. The fact that Windows itself comes with no BASIC interpreter is another fiendish plan devised to confuse anybody attempting to unravel this conspiracy.
This conspiracy also applies to Microsoft's other modern programming tools. Visual C++, with its Microsoft Foundation Classes, is a prime example of the raw evilness pouring from Redmond. MFC-compiled programs are so bloated that the entire Linux kernel could fit into their binaries several times over! And then there's J++, which is sinister in its own right.
In conclusion, by bundling inferior programming tools with its products during the 1980s (and today), Microsoft has stifled programming talent, and thus, its competition. The fact that Open Source software has flourished against this impediment is amazing. But we must ask ourselves, what would the computer industry be like if Microsoft had bundled a decent BASIC interpreter with MS-DOS in the 80s?