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Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of large sites which utilize the Microsoft stack

  • Microsoft.com
  • Dell
  • MySpace
  • PlentyOfFish
  • StackOverflow
  • Hotmail, Bing, WindowsLive

However, based on observation, nearly all of the top 500 sites seem to be running other platforms.What are the main reasons there's so little market penetration?

  • Cost?
  • Technology Limitations?
  • Does Microsoft cater to corporate / intranet environments more then public websites?

I'm not looking for market share, but rather large scale adoption of the MS stack.

Josh K
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realworldcoder
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    Could you please add your references to studies in your questions ? –  Nov 08 '10 at 18:27
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    @RealWorldCoder: Please state your sources, otherwise you're just guessing. – JBRWilkinson Nov 08 '10 at 18:34
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    I'm afraid this is based on observation. If I had a scientific study on all this, I probably wouldn't be asking. – realworldcoder Nov 08 '10 at 18:37
  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2557405/what-is-the-reason-large-sites-dont-use-mysql-with-asp-net –  Nov 08 '10 at 19:13
  • Top 500 sites *by US visitors*, no? – gbn Nov 08 '10 at 19:50
  • I think this question will lead to a non construtive windows vs linux battle. I vote to close –  Nov 08 '10 at 20:13
  • I fail to see how my original question (before being edited) didn't fit all 6 of the constructive question guidelines. Also find it strange that the leader of the windows vs linux battle chose to close the question. – realworldcoder Nov 08 '10 at 21:54
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    Closing a question based on what it might lead to? It's a valid and interesting question imo. – Lars A. Brekken Nov 08 '10 at 22:10
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    @Pierre: You didn't seem to mind leaving it open long enough to get an answer in there. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 22:25
  • @Lars: I agree. +1 to reopen. I find it a *very* interesting discussion, and would love to hear from people (*hint:* SO guys) on benefits they get from working with a full MS stack. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 22:26
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    Reopen is great, it prove it worth enought for the community –  Nov 09 '10 at 06:18
  • the definitive statistic link (based on observation) http://news.netcraft.com/ at time of commenting Apache 65%, IIS 16%, – gbjbaanb Aug 09 '11 at 16:24

10 Answers10

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I'll posit that it's because most of the "big websites" started out small. Google, Youtube, Facebook et al. were all at one time single-server sites that someone built as a hobby. They used LAMP-like stacks because: 1) they're cheap and the devs were poor and often 2) because they were at a university and university environments tend to favor OSS.

After the sites started growing, the developers just stuck to what they knew. In the early years, there wouldn't be enough time or money to do a big system rewrite. When, and if, that ever became an option, why switch to an entirely different base?

So I'm saying it's because that's just what they knew and had when they started. SO isn't any different if I recall that story correctly. The SO Founders knew MS stack, and had access to the tools/licenses/etc to start using it, and so that's what they used!

(I've also heard that they also wanted to prove that MS stack was just as good as LAMP for big sites, but that may be apocryphal.)

Farhan
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CodexArcanum
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    I think you hit the nail on the head with "starting out small". The companies that try to start big websites almost always fail. It's the little guys who've been innovators on the web, for the most part. – EricBoersma Nov 08 '10 at 20:15
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    There may also be a selective bias effect going on here too. A lot of social networking sites started as small experiments, an ideal project for a cheap and easy Linux-based stack. A lot of big MS shops though, doing internal IT work or consulting in specific industries, will use MS technologies. So there's a lot of MS stacks, they're just not as visible to such a wide variety of people. There's plenty of LAMP stacks in that crowd too. I've got no numbers, but I know that all the big name technologies get some play, and plenty of the small name stuff too. – CodexArcanum Nov 08 '10 at 21:21
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    It's not like they would love to move to windows but it's too late. They most likely don't ever want to move. The only reason people move from Linux to Windows is to play video games because video card drivers for Linux suck. – hasen Dec 31 '10 at 06:13
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    hasen j: Not because drives suck, but because most of the games are released of Windows than for GNU/Linux. –  Dec 31 '10 at 07:24
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    I don't think Google was a single-server system ever. The whole point of its super search algorithm (map reduce) is that it is distributed over many nodes. I also really doubt Youtube *ever* thought they could stream video to their intended target audience using 1 single server! Facebook on the other hand... – gbjbaanb Aug 09 '11 at 16:37
  • @gbjbaanb: Google started out being called "back rub", because the main feature of the search engine then was the ability to rank pages based on links, etc... – gahooa Nov 19 '12 at 20:28
  • RE: Single-Server. Fair enough, y'all are right that YouTube probably never was a single-server, but I was trying to say more that they were basement projects. More like single-dev (or a small group) but not a big business team. For smaller, agile groups, the LAMP-style stack is cheaper and more accessible than trying to get started with MS. At the time anyway, MS has made some great headway into offering cheaper starts for hobbyists. – CodexArcanum Nov 21 '12 at 15:32
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Cost

That's what I'm placing my money on. Facebook has 60k servers, what's the license cost on that vs. Linux?

Look at the "open stack" as we can call it:

  • Apache – Free
  • PHP - Free
  • MySQL - Free
  • Linux - Free

Contrast to the MS stack:

  • IIS - $$$
  • Visual Studio - $$$ (but it's great)
  • OS - $$$
  • SQL Server - $$$
Josh K
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    JoskK: you know just like me that Linux, PHP, MySql and Apache are not free. They are FAR from being free. –  Nov 08 '10 at 18:48
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    @Pierre: Um, it's all *gratis* software, there are no direct costs associated with using those. Although MySQL does have commercial implications. [Apache](http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#IsItFee), Ubuntu, PHP, all free. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 18:52
  • That pitch, without the qualifiers that should go with it, is why many go the OSS route. – Ryan Hayes Nov 08 '10 at 18:54
  • @JoshK: does the server manage themselves? Sysadmins are important. The platform you choose will eventually comes with the type of sysadmins you deserve, and their daily rate. –  Nov 08 '10 at 18:56
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    @Pierre you have a valid point, but you need sys admins either way. – Fosco Nov 08 '10 at 18:59
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    @Pierre: You have to pay for admins no matter what platform you choose! Do you think MS server admins are cheaper then Linux admins? – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 19:01
  • @Fosco/JoshK, now tell me how much earn a sysadmin with perfect knowledge of Linux. Answer the same question for one able to manage a Windows based server. No imagine yourself in the shoes of the guy who pay them. –  Nov 08 '10 at 19:17
  • @Pierre: I don't know anyone with a perfect knowledge of Linux **OR** Windows server. Plus I've never had to pay either of them so I'm not sure what the pay scale is. I know that *I* can work my way around a Linux box better then I can work my way around a Windows one. We don't have a dedicated sys admin, is it better to run servers your programmers aren't familiar with? – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 19:21
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    Pierre 303's comment about TCO is valid, but it doesn't make Josh K's answer invalid. He specifically addresses *license cost* for windows vs linux - which IS free vs money. That doesn't mean the total cost for running LAMP is 0, you do need admins. But Licensing cost is a contributing factor. – Jason Viers Nov 08 '10 at 19:41
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    To the TOC point. With the free sides of things you do not get any support. You are pretty much on you own to find someone that can help you if you run into problems. With the paid side, there is normally the added bonus of support that comes with the products fee. The dice rolls both ways, companies have switched to free siting the cost savings in the short term. Others have switched from free because of the lack of support and cost being more in the long run because of it. Both are valid. It depends on what is impotent for your situation. – Tony Nov 08 '10 at 20:15
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    I let myself be told that it is because of stability. At least, that's what the sysadmins at the VIB told me. Less downtime, less resources used, less safety leaks. I know for sure that has been the case at one point in time, but I had the impression MS did catch up on all those points lately. Anybody want to shed some light on this? I'm far from a sysadmin... – Joris Meys Nov 08 '10 at 20:24
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    Cost may indeed be the reason, but you bullet list of Microsoft technologies that cost money is wrong: .NET is free, Visual Studio is free (there are paid version too, just like there are paid version of PHP IDEs), SQL Server Express is free (again, there are paid version too), and IIS is an operating system component which is included for free with the OS. Also, you don't have to run the Microsoft stack (just call it by its name: ASP.NET) on Windows/IIS, it can run on Linux/Apache too (with Mono). – Allon Guralnek Nov 08 '10 at 21:06
  • Calling the MS stack "ASP.NET" is probably 80-90% true, but they're really not synonyms. IIS can run PHP normally, and the CGI interface means you could use any language/framework on it you felt like setting up. Likewise no one is restricted to MS SQL Server, swapping to another database is even easier than the IIS limits. The Windows/IIS/SQL-Server/ASP.NET combo is just the path of least resistance. – CodexArcanum Nov 08 '10 at 21:16
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    @Codex, @Allon: While you can mix and match, I assume that these large companies are going to want to fully utilize MS products. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 21:21
  • @Josh K You are most likely correct. No reason for a company to go upstream "just because" when using the full stack gets them much better support and compatibility. But that it is possible to do so, was my only point. – CodexArcanum Nov 08 '10 at 21:32
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    Also, if you've got 60,000 servers, You're not going to be paying retail price for each server. Microsoft has very competitive volume licensing. In fact, with that many servers, the cost of the Windows license would be a tiny fraction of the hardware cost. – Dean Harding Nov 08 '10 at 22:29
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    @Dean: 60k servers, sure. What about 1? 2? Do individuals really want to pay for their personal development servers? Individuals learn on their own dime and that carries over to companies. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 23:30
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    .NET is completely free. What are you talking about? – Adam Crossland Nov 09 '10 at 01:18
  • Removed .NET, I'm not in tune with MS's pricing tiers. Feel free to edit in correct information though. – Josh K Nov 09 '10 at 03:09
  • @Josh K: I was just responding to the assertion that Facebook has 60k servers, so to buy licenses for all of them vs Linux would be prohibitive. Relative to the cost of the hardware, licenses for 60k "copies" of Windows would be tiny. If you are a startup with only a few servers, then [BizSpark](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/stack-overflow-and-bizspark/) gives you production licenses for all your software - free - for the first three years. – Dean Harding Nov 09 '10 at 03:50
  • Cost of a license from MS is not terrible. My local MS evangelist told me that if you are paying full price for MS products, that you are doing it wrong. Meaning if you work with MS, you will get product discounts. The fact is you are paying for support (more or less). That is why RHE linux can exist. You are not buying RHE, you are paying for the support. It is more or less the same thing with MS products and services. It is up to the costumer to figure out if they can live without the safety net. – Tony Nov 09 '10 at 12:52
  • "Safety net"? I'm not sure about that... – Halil Özgür Dec 23 '10 at 15:47
  • With the exception of the OS, you should pull the dollar signs off your post since all of those things come in free versions. To get enterprise features you are going to pay money for the licensing. Even RHEL costs money, and the last time I checked it was pretty comparable to Microsoft. You could also argue that MySql isn't free since they have commercial editions for enterprise level customers. – tcnolan Dec 31 '10 at 06:57
  • Allon Guralnek: Express editions could not be used for commercial work. Its for educational purpose. That's what their license agreement reads. So basically Microsoft stack is not free. But I heard some notable person telling that, "Microsoft is the cheapest enterprise vendor". Doesn't remember who told that. –  Dec 31 '10 at 07:29
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    @jase21: Express editions can be used for _anything_. Commercial or otherwise. See here: http://www.microsoft.com/express/Support/Support-faq.aspx "Yes, there are no licensing restrictions for applications built using Visual Studio Express Editions." – Steven Evers Dec 31 '10 at 21:30
  • Express editions definitely can be used for anything. I've now seen it used in two companies that are legit. Actually I'd wager that if you outgrew the free sql express upgrading shouldn't be a monetary problem anymore. It is a capable platform. The only stuff from MS not supposed to be for commercial use I can think of is anything you get via Dreamspark. – Rig Jan 24 '12 at 04:22
  • "Cost of a license from MS is not terrible. My local MS evangelist told me that if you are paying full price for MS products, that you are doing it wrong.": Yes but Linux is free == 0 $. – Giorgio Nov 20 '12 at 10:37
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    eBay is a "properly large" website that's had an interesting history. It started out as a Perl script, which maxed out at 50,000 active items (1995). It was then upgraded to a v2 architecture, which used a DLL written in C++ (eBayISAPI.dll) and ran on NT (1997). In '99, search migrates back to Unix. In 2002, they had a single DLL compiled from 3.3 million LOC of C++ and hitting compiler limits on methods per class (!). Finally in 2002-2007 they migrate to Java, and I don't really know what has changed since 2007 ([reference](http://goo.gl/vyPpY8)). – Roman Starkov Jun 29 '15 at 08:12
  • SQL Express is free?? That depends on what you're doing with it. I just had to migrate some stuff from SQL Express to a linux box running MySQL because the program would fail to connect to the server once it went past the 20 users permitted on desktop versions of Windows. – Loren Pechtel Jul 09 '15 at 23:32
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I don't think cost is the primary reason, but sites like Google need a high level of control over what runs on their servers. They don't use a default installation of Ubuntu on their servers. Managing thousands of servers means that an awful lot of administration tasks must be automated. Command line oriented, modular open source operating systems like Linux or *BSD are probably better suited for the amount of customization a site like Google requires.

EDIT: And let's not forget that many of those top500 sites compete in one or more ways with Microsoft, so they probably don't want to rely on the technology of a competitor if they can avoid it.

user281377
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Culture

Great hackers demand control. Great hackers share stuff.

All the cool toys come from great hackers, and they end up sharing and improving on each other.

Think of all the cool shiny stuff that's been coming out recently: Python, Ruby, Rails, Django, Flask, Node.js, etc.

All of them come from people who use a Unix system (Linux or Mac).

Unix systems offer a great platform and great tools for serious programmers to do their work.

Windows systems and Visual Studio tend to be used more by people who just want to "get things done" in the established way and earn some living.

It's not just because they start small as CodexArcanum's answer suggests. It's not like "oh they would love to move to windows but it's too late". They probably don't want to move to windows. It's severely lacking in terms of tools and power for the kinds of things involved in running a web startup.

For starters, most new shiny OSS projects use git for version control, and probably have their official code repository at github or something like that.

To quote Paul Graham:

What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. In fact, that's an understatement. Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They'll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

(.....)

A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.

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hasen
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  • +1 hasen j for culture. I don't think that's always the case though - cost is a really important factor too. – talonx Dec 31 '10 at 06:52
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    Many people get windows for free. Specially the programmers/geeky types who can easily find a torrent for it. Also, many hacker types get Macs, which is rather expensive. As for the tools, well, the free Unix tools are available for windows too, and windows has its own free tools that are not available for Unix. – hasen Dec 31 '10 at 10:44
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    +1. Just look at academia. Almost everything interesting is done in Unix. – asthasr Mar 07 '11 at 15:13
  • What point are you trying to make by pointing out that most OSS projects use GIT for source control? – MattDavey Oct 21 '11 at 11:27
  • +1 for citing "Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools". – Giorgio Nov 20 '12 at 10:39
  • "Many people get windows for free. Specially the programmers/geeky types who can easily find a torrent for it.": I doubt they can use an illegal Windows copy on a production system for long without being sued. – Giorgio Nov 20 '12 at 11:44
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    @MattDavey Once you have become accustomed to use `git` for version control, you are very likely to literally refuse to use something like `svn` if you have any self-respect. It's really that much better. And that's precisely what hasen is talking about: Really good coders have a lot of self-respect and won't want to work with inferior tools like `svn`. They'd rather connect to an `svn` repository via a `git svn` clone, so they can at least use the full power of `git` locally. – cmaster - reinstate monica Jul 09 '15 at 17:41
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    @cmaster yes I see your point - a lot has changed in the last 4 years and these days I act exactly as you describe. In fact in my current contract I'm connecting to an svn repo with git-svn because I refuse to be limited to svn. 4 years ago I was still a beginner with git. – MattDavey Aug 07 '15 at 09:00
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So few? I don't think 34% market share is few.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/all

It's the study with the lowest result for Windows I've found.

There are others studies that grant Windows revenue based market share weight more than 60%.

Few is definitely not the good word to use.

More studies:

Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2748543820080228

Netcraft: https://ssl.netcraft.com/ssl-sample-report//CMatch/osdv_all

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Servers

Does Microsoft technologies based websites can actually scale?

www.live.com (5th Alexa), www.msn.com (11th Alexa), www.microsoft.com (21th Alexa) or www.bing.com (25th Alexa) webmasters ;)

MySpace is also windows based.

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    I am not talking about overall market share.I'm talking about properly *large* websites. Think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google. – realworldcoder Nov 08 '10 at 18:36
  • @Pierre: I simply did an edit and removed the DV. I understand it's not few, but I believe the question is asking why large sites don't use it. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 18:41
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    If you want the proof Microsoft technologies scale, just check hotmail.com, windowslive.com, office.com, bing.com, microsoft.com. Most of them are even in the TOP 25 of Alexa in term of traffic. –  Nov 08 '10 at 18:43
  • @JoshK. Thank you, I have just wrote a comment about that . I may edit my question too. –  Nov 08 '10 at 18:44
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    @Pierre: See my answer, I don't think it's about ability to scale, I think it's about raw cost. Microsoft owns all those sites, they don't have to pay licensing fees. ;) – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 18:46
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    @JoskK: he is asking about .NET and SQL scalability. Then he supposes that they decide to use linux instead because of licensing. Do you really think licensing is an issue for those large coroporations ? ;) I don't think so. –  Nov 08 '10 at 18:47
  • @Pierre: He says nothing about scalability, he asks about limitations and costs. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 18:53
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    @JoshK: his question starts with "Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of large sites which **prove that .NET and SQL can actually scale**:" –  Nov 08 '10 at 18:54
  • @Pierre - I should hope Microsoft would choose their own technology ;) It's the rest I'm curious about. For the record, I don't need convincing that .NET can scale - I know it can! – realworldcoder Nov 08 '10 at 18:59
  • @Pierre: I'm going to edit that out, it shouldn't be a scaling question but rather an adoption question. – Josh K Nov 08 '10 at 19:02
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    In terms of adoption, the "properly large" websites are inherently not representative (with the obvious exception of Stackoverflow (-:) - firstly they seldom set out to be huge and secondly once you get to that scale you almost start creating your own platform if you haven't already (facebook have had to, google had already). – Murph Nov 08 '10 at 19:46
  • Pierre 303: Licensing is still an issue. –  Dec 31 '10 at 07:26
  • @jase21: if it was, no one would use that stack at all. Like everything, MSFT stack can be cheaper for ones, and more expansive for the others, depending on their internal resources, history, partners, and so on. –  Dec 31 '10 at 11:30
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    The 60% part is not accurate as it's based on the revenue from sale of the operating system. If you can't see a problem with that, just ask yourself, who pays for linux? – dan_waterworth Dec 31 '10 at 11:37
  • @dan: none of the studies mentioned are accurate. They just tend to prove that **few** is not the correct word to use. –  Dec 31 '10 at 11:38
  • @Pierre, The w3techs.com one is fairly accurate. It has an unbiased sample (unlike netcraft) and it's based on querying the server rather than revenue. There's still problems like, how do virtual hosts count? (but taking the top million websites should ameliorate this) – dan_waterworth Dec 31 '10 at 11:49
  • @dan: also sales can't tell us how much of those servers are public like the one w3techs queries... –  Dec 31 '10 at 11:54
  • About that last point: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/MySpace-Dan-Farino – fretje Mar 07 '11 at 08:11
  • According to w3techs.com "Popular sites using Unix" are: Mail.ru, Fc2.com, Go.com, and other sites that I've never heard about. Where are Google, Facebook, Amazon, Dropbox, etc.? The study either is flawed or biased. – feklee Jun 16 '13 at 00:49
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The (web) start-up world is heavily open-source based because of cost and prevalence of excellent tools such as memcache, noSQL databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB etc and large-scale data processing tools such as Hadoop/MapReduce. Until recently Microsoft hadn't paid much lip service to budding start-up enthusiasts and only recently started their "web developer" program to support start-ups. Also, their large scale data processing efforts have been a bit slow...Dryad/DryadLINQ, their alternative to MapReduce, has not seen the level of adoption they would like (its still limited to research schools outside Microsoft) and things have suddenly gone quiet on their (experimental) database system Hyder which supposedly allows scaling databases without partitioning. All this time Google has been giving excess to world class tools such as Dremel, Sawzall, etc to allow competitive advantage on the web and Amazon keeps making their web services and cloud computing services more easily accessible to the average start-up.

This also ties in with a question I asked a while ago: apart from Microsoft, all other web companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook, Ebay, etc post job openings where they specifically list the LAMP stack as the tech stack required for their software engineer positions. Clearly people well versed in the LAMP stack have an advantage at many startups and big web companies while the .NET stack seems to be mostly reserved for corporate environments.

fjxx
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Cost factor definitely contributes to initial adoption of open source technologies.

But even when they grow really really big, they stick to open source stuff. If you have seen videos explaining scale at facebook or google, they invest lot of engineering effort in bettering the technologies they use (unladen swallow for python, hiphop for php). Also if they find there is a need for something completely new or a better implementation (thrift, protocol buffers, cassandra, big table), they not only create it, they open source it too.

I think the reason is control and minimizing risk because you do not have to depend upon a vendor to provide a solution for you.

aufather
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I'll throw in a vote for "tradition". During the whole dot-com run-up, "everybody knew" you had to have a big Sun or HP server running Apache, so that's what people bought. And when start-ups tried to emulate the successful companies, they used the same stuff. And since IIS didn't really offer any compelling features (unless you consider Front Page extensions...) there really wasn't any reason for anyone to consider a MS stack. Especially when you could run Apache and/or Perl CGI scripts on a 4-CPU Sun box, while dual-core Pentium II Windows boxes were fairly exotic. Now that the hardware is no longer a barrier, we're seeing more large sites on the MS stack, but I think that for most there's still no compelling reason to switch to (or start with) it.

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I am particularly interested in this question, and find the answers above to be very thought-provoking. I have specific experience with management of Windows servers.

I will say that the comment about command-line tools is a little bit off the mark: Command-line tools are just as common when administering Windows servers as they are when administering Unix. The tools of choice would be OpenSSH for Windows, psexec in a pinch, WMI tools and more recently powershell with remoting. Windows 2003 Enterprise came with an SMS-ish management system called ADS. Once of the primary features of ADS that made it useable was the command-line interface to managing remote jobs.

As for the control over what runs in the OS: Yes, absolutely. Microsoft is only just getting the point recently, with Windows 2008 Server having a stripped-down (such as it is) flavor which has many fewer services/features. This is also been a continuum -- you could see the direction MSFT was going with 2003 Server shipping with many of its services off by default.

Cost is the most interesting factor. Licensing fees for Windows server is the #1 difference between the LAMP solution and a Windows ASP.NET solution. The birth of so many startups from academia is another big reason for the use of LAMP.

Conversion of large sites from LAMP to Windows ASP.NET can be done -- But it requires a tremendous amount of effort. Often times the conversion does not really happen until the next major version of the website is written from scratch, at which point it is written in Windows. The company with the most experience doing these conversions is Microsoft. Hotmail, WebTV, and Tellme are three examples.

I started this post by saying that I am particularly interesting in this question. The reason I am so interested in the use of Windows in Websites is because I am a Microsoft employee working on a major website. And I have to say I'm a little disappointed to realize just how few career options I have in terms of non-Microsoft Windows-based websites that I could move to.

  • its not just cost (thought the cost of a SA licence will be millions per year for facebook!) but stability. If you have 60k servers, Patch Tuesday and rebooting after a Windows update is not looked kindly upon. You have more control over Linux services in this respect to Windows. Still, learn some Linux tech - its not difficult and is really refreshing to see how modular it all is. – gbjbaanb Aug 09 '11 at 16:34
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Are you talking about Microsoft Platform or IIS Platform?. Many third party web servers are running on it. Like Apache does also run on windows platform. There are many public facing banking sites like citibank.com and etc using Java as platform. There is some technological limitation. Running Java on IIS is big hard task but IIS is improving and it is now scalable for larger organization. PHP on IIS is working perfectly fine now with Fastcgi support it is faster. With IIS 7/7.5 SEO friendly and open source software like PHP running website is possible.

If you check While Microsoft dominates 34% of total Web Server operating system which compares to Unix is half but they have improved a lot compare to past years and you can see that IIS is improving a lot. You can check following URL:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all

Cost?

Yes, Microsoft License is costly compare to NIX environment but if you compare but TCO on linux is higher. Normal System Administrator on Liux cost much more compare to Windows System Administrator.

Technology Limitations?

Till now, MS has technological limitation for large scale organization also Java works very well in enterprise and financial sector website but after IIS 7/IIS 7.5 scenario is changing with Web development environment like .Net framework and Portal like Share Point Portal Microsoft is improving a lot.

Does Microsoft cater to corporate / intranet environments more then public websites?

Yes, with newer version of Windows and IIS Microsoft is catering public websites and they will surely do well in future.

Gaurav Maniar MCP | MCSE | MCST | MCITP | ITILv3 Certified

maniargaurav
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    TCO for Linux may be higher or lower, depending on your environment and requirements. Slapping something together may be cheaper with MS, but quality administration will be expensive on either. – David Thornley Nov 29 '10 at 20:53