Google, Facebook, Amazon and just about every big internet company (with the possible exceptions of EBay and, well, Microsoft) are NOT using windows in the backend and never have. They could probably afford Windows server licensing, database licensing, etc NOW, but they would not have been able to while growing.
Now, if you start a company and you think you might grow ... which stack will you use?
Not much of an issue with programs such as BizSpark. You have 3 years to 'grow' and afterwards you have to fork over a couple thousand bucks, depending on what you use.
The thing is, Unix systems (OSX included) are much more developer friendly. Windows doesn't even have a decent terminal emulator yet, you have to resort to things such as conemu.
Now, if Windows can be 'unixified', then I believe the trend may be reversed. As is is, you can't compete with the amount of utilities and server software for all unix flavors.
Yes, one has been able to graft nix to Windows since NT; however, it's still like a third arm dangling off of C:\whatever.
If Microsoft can make a POSIX layer like OS X did -- one that ships with the OS and feels like it is part of the OS -- I'd be very, very interested.
I've been on OS X since Apple was nearly dead (still have my 10.0.6 CD somewhere around here). Before jumping on, I bounced from the promise of Linux distro to FreeBSD, to OpenBSD -- trying to find something that worked as a desktop environment. Once OS X was released, I knew I found what I had been looking for. It definitely wasn't because it was from Apple (back then, using Apple was being counterculture, if not somewhat risky as the business wasn't doing so well); it was because there was finally a desktop OS that had a POSIX layer and a GUI that didn't feel like a third arm grafted on to /usr/local/whatever.
I'm hoping that MS catches the drift that DOS is dead & can kill that sacred cow; I'd love to get a Surface tablet & develop for Windows Phone, but having to deal with DOS is like moving out of a house and trying to live in a tent. My experiences with Powershell haven't been all that much better. It's definitely not got the same problems as DOS, but in my experience it didn't implement the paradigm of a pipeable set of simple tools to accomplish singular tasks.
I'd love to see a POSIX compliant Microsoft OS. And to me, these recent changes bode well -- it seems that Microsoft realizes it must be a part of a larger ecosystem. The is the kind of OS I want to work with has this kind of thinking at its core.
> Not much of an issue with programs such as BizSpark. You have 3 years to 'grow' and afterwards you have to fork over a couple thousand bucks, depending on what you use.
Are you sure? Facebook and Google both had thousands of servers when they were three year old (they are in the millions now), and facebook already had sizable databases that would have cost a small fortune had they been MSSQL (or Oracle or DB2 for that matter).
I was under the possibly mistaken impression the BizSpark covers your devtools, not your deployment.
And the costs are just the most easily quantifiable advantage - Google, Facebook and Whatsup have all modified their stack (Linux Kernel, MySQL, Erlang VM) in ways that are simply not available with the Microsoft stack.
Granted, not every business is Google or Facebook - but anyone who dreams big enough sees Microsoft's stack does not make sense .... and even when you are thinking small, there are really few reasons to rely in Microsoft except at the edges.
Now, if you start a company and you think you might grow ... which stack will you use?