- ActiveX
- Propietary software with opaque terms
- Expensive, pirated IDE's
- Hard as hell C++ standards with the Win32 API and a crappy cmd.exe against Unix+C+GDB/DDD and Perl for quick hacks.
- Advanced Windows users gateekeeping you for anything beyong a basic usage from an OS.
From 2001-2002 and GNU/Linux distros, things were far better for experimenting and learning.