Windows 8 or Office 15 that are geared for mobile and 
  touch friendly launching in like six months or so.

5 years behind the competition. Windows is so far behind iOS it's embarassing.

  I just searched for 'Visual Basic'... Salary Estimate

What you're not able to do a bing search for is how long-term these high-paying Visual Basic jobs are going to last. There's no future in Visual Basic because it's not for building apps in a mobile computing paradigm. It's an old-school desktop GUI paradigm, the paradigm that is quickly being replaced with mobile computing... where Microsoft is at an enormous disadvantage. Nobody is building mobile apps using Visual Basic.

  >The entire MS stack has been abandoned by the next generation of innovators.
  You mean by people like StackOverflow?

Out of every 100 Silicon Valley startups, I think you'll find about 1% or less are using any Microsoft technologies. You conveniently provided one of those 1%.