@dead_man I never said Java was supposed to replace C.

A programmer who can't be trusted to touch memory is like a surgeon who can't be trusted with a scalpel, simply incompetent and dangerous. The surgeon doesn't expect the scalpel to miss an artery for him, he has to know where to cut. You, the programmer, should understand where you need to be careful about memory and design your code in such a way that you're not going to blow up the world when you make a mistake. C does not stop you from doing that, it just doesn't do it for you.

The Microsoft problem is the same problem every large, long-running organization has. It has far too many people working on a poorly-architected product, who have little understanding of the product they're trying to modify because they didn't write it, it wasn't documented and they're too lazy/dumb to dig into their little piece to see how it works. That's not a language level problem and it will not be fixed by switching languages.