Experimental evidence suggests that people want to use Visual Basic and Windows, actually. Although the language stats may have changed since the last time I looked at them, I'm reasonably certain at least Windows is still on top. Make of that what you will.
Edit: For what it's worth, I have some sympathy for Microsoft's position. I don't doubt that if they could just break away from backward compatibility they could make something far less kludgy than what they have; unfortunately, if they did break away from it, they'd lose an awful lot of money. Alas.
Erm, do people want to use VB for programming libraries and core system tools? (I thought we're talking about such case, as Go authors clearly stated that's their target).
Go competes rather with C/C++ than with VB or any Lisp.
C'mon guys, you don't have to bash any language or solution only because somebody wants to use it for some reason (which may be different than yours).
Having Go in a toolchain traditionally reserved to gcc will only make things better and will NOT threaten a position of your shiny new high level language.
I wish Go people success. They are smart hackers from the ol' days.
Edit: For what it's worth, I have some sympathy for Microsoft's position. I don't doubt that if they could just break away from backward compatibility they could make something far less kludgy than what they have; unfortunately, if they did break away from it, they'd lose an awful lot of money. Alas.