:) I know that MS bashing is de rigueur. So de rigueur, in fact, that many tend to downvote the most mindless variety of the genre to prevent from descending i

:) I know that MS bashing is de rigueur. So de rigueur, in fact, that many tend to downvote the most mindless variety of the genre to prevent from descending into proggit. Hence my little throat clearing. As for whether the web stack is different from the OS -- of course it is to an extent, but the initial poster is proof positive that there is a strong correlation between low level platform and tools. I suppose it is possible to use Django and git and emacs on Windows, but it would not be pleasant unless I was using Cygwin, at which point you may as well use OS X or Linux. Re: cloud and other components: come now, is there anyone in high performance computing still paying per node for closed source MS licenses? Is there anyone in HPC who wasn't using rsync before MS came out with their clone for "branch office" management? And what proportion of people using EC2 use Windows instances that are just not as easy to automate as their Linux counterparts? These questions answer themselves. The hypothetical concept of platform equivalence is as academically valid and practically irrelevant as the Turing equivalence of Brainf@@k and Python. You are bending over too far backwards to be fair to Redmond :) tl;dr = people working on the MS stack in 2009 tend to be behind in their thinking about tech. The next big thing will not be on Windows.