> Yet most people won't even touch .NET because it's not hip. .NET isn't that well supported outside of Windows though. At least not to the same degree Java is

> Yet most people won't even touch .NET because it's not hip. .NET isn't that well supported outside of Windows though. At least not to the same degree Java is. And a lot of that is down to Microsoft. .NET was pretty awful when it was first released. Granted it's been solid for a great number of years now, but originally it was just MS lashing out at Sun because Sun Microsystems took MS to court over Microsoft's own (partly incompatible) version of Java (massively paraphrasing history here!!!). But that was a long time ago and .NET has diverged and morphed into so much more since. However for a long time it never felt like Microsoft was not giving any love to .NET outside of Windows. Yes, I appreciate Mono does exist, but there's a lot of proprietary stuff in .NET that, until recently, MS refused to port. So even once .NET really became an attractive technology to develop against, it's cross platform support was still stunted by Microsoft's own need to dominate. It's also worth noting that .NET is still hugely popular - or at least in England. But those organisations running .NET tend to buy into the entire Microsoft stack (.NET, IIS, MS SQL Server, etc) - which really just goes to reinforce Microsoft's justification for making Mono a second class citizen. However with Microsoft's recent headlines (SQL Server being ported to Linux, greater collaboration with Mono, etc), there's a real potential that .NET will become a lot more relevant outside of Windows too. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there's now also more competition in the Linux / UNIX ecosystem than there's ever been.