Having been around for quite awhile, going back to the days when Microsoft used to threaten startups (eg "We'll cut off your oxygen supply" was a threat I perso

Having been around for quite awhile, going back to the days when Microsoft used to threaten startups (eg "We'll cut off your oxygen supply" was a threat I personally received from a MSFT rep if we didn't join their initiative that competed with us) anyone who wanted to have a viable product would host it on linux because MSFT would do things like make your software not run as well under windows as their software did, and stuff like that. OF course since they also charged per user licensing for servers, if you're a startup you might as well use linux which is "Free" (at least free of cost, you still need human resources to manage the machines.) Finally their confusing constantly changing product and development strategy left people worn out- once you were locked into one technology they would introduce another. Open source basically destroyed all of MSFTs advantages for development in tech companies, and now you only use MSFT technology if you're only deploying on MSTF machines. Oh, and MSFT killed the packaged software market-- which was completely dead, you really couldn't sell apps, until Apple created the App store-- because they wanted to own the desktop completely. There used to be a rich ecosystems of desktop apps but they were all killed- the only exception like Adobe and ... and I can't think of any other exceptions--were that way because they gobbled up smaller companies faster than MSFT did and got big enough to compete. MSFT killed the desktop software market completely....again, except on Apple platforms where it was a level playing field. (but all the MBAs in eh 1990s would say "macs don't have enough market share" and kill mac versions, even though in cases where companies did do cross platform they often made all their profits on the mac, and had the larger sales of the PC washed away by the much larger support costs for PC customers.)