Another Talli link: Joel has written an article on the how's and when's of moving to .NET. Joel's in an uncommon position in that his company ships both a client and a server product, so he has the extra consideration of worrying about when the .NET runtime gets installed on that critical mass of machines to make deployment less of a hassle.
Joel has defended his choice of Microsoft as an operating system and a platform from a business perspective in previous missives, and I have to grudgingly admit that I think it adds up. He's shooting to carve out a niche in the desktop market, and there's really only one game in town there. On the server side, I think the logic can be different, but when you go to sell software or deploy it to most IT departments in this country, the story is sadly all to often "Why doesn't it run on Windows?".
So once you've decided to sell package software, you're stuck figuring out not whether to upgrade to the next shin-dig Microsoft throws your way, but when. When MS stops supporting their last version of SQL Server, your application has to get rev'd to catch up. Joel plays up the advancements of Microsofts platform, and there are a bunch. But the fact of the matter is it could have been garbarge and he would have ported, for the same reasons he laid out before. The technology is secondary. The marketing, ubiquity and brand-recognition of Windows makes it #1.
10:37:41 PM 
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