[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.