For me, the benefit of abandoning (or, at least, not focusing on) Windows, is that you aren't constrained in terms of tools and toys. Things like memcached, va

For me, the benefit of abandoning (or, at least, not focusing on) Windows, is that you aren't constrained in terms of tools and toys. Things like memcached, varnish, nginx, redis, mongodb, node, (etc, etc, etc) either only work on NIX, work considerably better on NIX, or come out much earlier for NIX. Microsoft and its [mostly commercial] partners are significantly out-paced/innovated by the OSS world. I don't want to go over each of your points, but I think some of them are silly. Abandon Windows because "if Microsof goes down"..come on. Or, talking about the open philosophy of Unix, and then lumping Apple into Unix on hardware? Apple != Unix. For your product, you should pick the solution that makes sense. And there might be more than one. Cost should probably be a factor, so should funness. Do what feels right, learn from mistake, iterate.