Are you talking about high-performance high-reliability server applications, or more about end-user front-end applications? There's a bit of a difference when

Are you talking about high-performance high-reliability server applications, or more about end-user front-end applications? There's a bit of a difference when it comes to running servers with thousands of users where you want to squeeze every drop of performance out of your hardware and without ever losing data, as to developing an end-user POS interface or other GUI applications. FreeBSD might be picked more often for back-end applications and Windows more for user-facing applications. It's the difference between keeping one user happy versus keeping many as happy as possible. It probably doesn't matter much what kind of car you drive in the city centre – the requirements and limits are very different than on a race track where every little detail matters in the performance equation.