there is a whole generation of developers who came out of college with the notion of Microsoft being evil. also the trends setup by VC's like YCombinator, good

there is a whole generation of developers who came out of college with the notion of Microsoft being evil. also the trends setup by VC's like YCombinator, good college/university like MIT is, you can make cool products with open source ecosystem. not sure how much you would remember, about 15 years ago it used to cost a large chunk of money to build scalable apps as 70% of the investment was sunk into datacenter acquisition. another cool aspect is lot of new popular apps like posterous, started out as a single usable idea were implemented over a weekend and polished with multiple iterations. licensing cost is still a big negative for those have discovered the power of open source technology, also the community is lot more evolved in sharing the expertise. application frameworks like Ruby on Rails played a big role in getting the best practices like MVC Architecture, source code management, TDD/BDD, code generation, reuse in open source web frameworks cloud computing infrastructure like amazon web services and linode VPS maks people experiment new projects at lot less cost. Personally I have problems with many .Net developers who are "fish out of water", when it comes to living without the Visual Studio IDE. standards and features like XHTML, AJAX(prototype, jquery others ) came lot later in .Net programmers toolset until Internet Explorer was the leading in developer mindshare.