Everyone has the "luxury of choice," but it inevitably comes with cost. I speak from personal experience -- I know the .NET stack very well, and am very famili

Everyone has the "luxury of choice," but it inevitably comes with cost. I speak from personal experience -- I know the .NET stack very well, and am very familiar with the LAMP stack from my days with PHP, but I've only dabbled in Ruby and Python. Before starting work on our startup, I considered writing it in Rails, but the reality is that it would have taken me much longer to get to market. We hit the market at a very opportune time, and were able to ride a nice wave of buzz to sustainability. If we'd waited another couple of months (my guess at the added overhead of learning Rails), we may have missed our window. The same would naturally apply to someone who already was well-versed in, say, Rails -- it would make no sense to learn .NET unless there was a very compelling reason (say, you were writing a Windows desktop app). Not to mention that the first app you write using any technology you don't understand well is going to suck. If I'm going to base my livelihood on a product, I want it to be as well-written as possible, so I'm going to go with what I'm best at. Also, it's absolutely not true that you're locking out Linux and Mac developers when you write .NET. Some of the best .NET developers I know use a MacBook Pro as their primary machine.