> I've worked in a variety of shops, both "Microsoft" shops and non-Microsoft shops, and I would most certainly agree with the GP That Microsoft shops tend to b

> I've worked in a variety of shops, both "Microsoft" shops and non-Microsoft shops, and I would most certainly agree with the GP That Microsoft shops tend to be dominated by developers who like the comfort of just eating whatever pablum Microsoft is serving, often even if that pablum will take years longer to digest than competitive alternatives. There is, in general, a tunnel vision that profoundly limits the options available to build solutions, at substantial project cost. I dunno about this. The vast majority of costs in any project is contractors / staff rather than licenses. I added up the cost of hiring 3 contractors for a month versus just buying a piece of software that did 90% of what the business needed. We were much more expensive. > And it's understandable. If you're at a Microsoft shop you aren't going to challenge the norm if your first choice is SQL Server and BizTalk and Azure, etc. It's the easy, laziest option. Occasionally it might be the best option, but that's just accidental given that the choice was predetermined. It is also kinda counter-productive for everyone else. If everyone knows how to do something in a particular language + IDE it makes things easy because knowledge can be shared without a steep learning curve. e.g. I write lots of scripts using python, I mainly work in .NET shops. I left instructions for the whole process on how to get the script to run for an adhoc support job I wrote 5 or 6 years ago. For whatever reason it broke (the db structure changed slightly). I have been in a lot of contracts since that job and it was just cheaper for them to call me up and pay me to fix the script than have one of their devs look at it. The only reason I wrote it in python at the time was because I didn't know Powershell at the time and they said I could use what I wanted as long as it was documented.