You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration. First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor

You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration. First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. Did they then administer it? Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment. There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.