[reuser]

Personally, I doubt there is a real quality problem with those platforms. But running .NET on those platforms looks unnecessarily expensive to me. If I were married to Microsoft (as SO is) then I would avoid 'the cloud' for that reason.

Given that one wishes to use Windows/.NET, I feel the decision follows pretty naturally from an analysis of costs - no vague argument about culture necessary

[hughesdan]

I would say cost (referring to license fees) is more relevant in deciding whether or not to choose the .NET stack in the first place. You're not going to avoid license fees by avoiding the cloud.

Their culture argument is a funny one. But I have no beef with it. If owning and tinkering with the hardware makes them happy, more power to them.

As an aside, I've been using Azure lately for my .NET projects. MSFT has done a nice job with that platform and don't get enough credit for it IMHO. I especially like SQL Azure.