[TomOfTTB]

There are good answers throughout this thread but the thing I find a lot of people forget is support.

Startup founders and small businesses tend to have more talent available to them. When you have 4 guys with MIT degrees you can hack through problems so you don’t need support. But if you’re a big company you sometimes have to settle for the day laborer. The guy who can do the grunt work coding but who slams on the brakes when he runs into any kind of problem.

As someone running a shop with those type of workers you have a choice. Have them wait for one of the more senior people to help them or throw $300 at the problem and have them call support.

This doesn’t produce the most elegant code but most big companies aren’t interested in that anyway. If it works and crashes relatively rarely most corporations are fine with it.

Unrelated to that it should also be mentioned that companies like IBM and Microsoft market to non-IT execs where as open solutions don’t have marketing departments. There’s a reason they say “No one ever got fired buying Microsoft”