I felt that way a bit until I met the people at Red Gate and saw what they're with the local startup community. While Cambridge has a great history of startups (ARM and a lot of other high-tech companies) it's not particularly friendly for small startups. Red Gate is helping a LOT, with desk space and a good vibe. I'm really not a MSFT fan, but I'm a huge fan of Red Gate.
I just can't imagine a world where you can't ssh into linuxy servers and do things.
Trying to run anything on top of windows doesn't fill me with confidence. Do all windows servers still insist on having a GUI etc? I honestly don't know, but I'd be extremely worried working on a startup running things on windows.
(Note I'm really talking as consumer facing website/webapp). For b2b microsoft is probably a saner choice.
I ssh into my Windows machines all the time. And Windows servers don't insist on having a GUI - look up Server Core, the GUI is limited to a console and everything is (and must be) done with the command line.
The console, hilariously, looks like someone pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del and killed explorer.exe and just left a DOS box running.
They've done a remarkable job trying to remove Windows from Windows Server, but (they admit) they are still not quite there yet - the evidence is in the volume of patches that must still be applied to Windows Server Core.
The POSIX subsystem might have a sshd of some form, but I haven't looked at it in ages. But I generally never use Windows without Cygwin, it was that that I was referring to.
I share your dislike for the Windows platform -- for uses other than as a web browser boot loader and media player -- but Red Gate are (smartly) following the money. How many non-MS developers do you know that pay for dev and admin tools?
