A quick meta-tangent: "at the risk of being downvoted" adds little to the discussion in the best of times. "At the risk of being downvoted for criticizing Microsoft" adds little to the discussion and requires about as much courage as an American presidential candidate taking a principled stand strongly in favor of apple pie.
A good portion of the innovation taking place these days is on the web, and the stacks at issue aren't what the client is running ("a browser") nearly as much as they are how you generate the stuff you pass over to them. (I know browser incompatibilities are a headache -- a four-figure headache for me last month, actually -- but they're quickly becoming a headache that some ubermensch JS framework author suffers so that I don't have to.)
A portion of current innovation in tech is the web stack (notably absent from your list). A portion of it is associated technologies that may not interact with the customer directly ever, such as cloud stuff (anything from S3 to Azure to VPSes). A portion of that is taking the wealth of data/apps already available and reusing it in new and innovative ways. And a portion is process innovation, which has very little to do with your technology vendor of choice and a lot to do with how you use the tools you're using.
I have never done development dedicated to a MS platform (although my Swing apps and web apps are most commonly used on them), but I'm pretty sure you can write A/B tests in .NET.
I think you get this, because you cite StackOverflow. StackOverflow could be written in any of a dozen languages, in almost any web stack. It isn't innovative because of magic that it does on the server side -- it is innovative because of how they have incentivized a community to work for them via the karma/badge system, how they work the StackOverflow-is-an-executable-advertisement-for-StackExchange business model, etc etc.
I know that MS bashing is de rigueur. So de rigueur, in fact, that many tend to downvote the most mindless variety of the genre to prevent from descending into proggit. Hence my little throat clearing.
As for whether the web stack is different from the OS -- of course it is to an extent, but the initial poster is proof positive that there is a strong correlation between low level platform and tools. I suppose it is possible to use Django and git and emacs on Windows, but it would not be pleasant unless I was using Cygwin, at which point you may as well use OS X or Linux.
Re: cloud and other components: come now, is there anyone in high performance computing still paying per node for closed source MS licenses? Is there anyone in HPC who wasn't using rsync before MS came out with their clone for "branch office" management? And what proportion of people using EC2 use Windows instances that are just not as easy to automate as their Linux counterparts?
These questions answer themselves. The hypothetical concept of platform equivalence is as academically valid and practically irrelevant as the Turing equivalence of Brainf@@k and Python. You are bending over too far backwards to be fair to Redmond :)
tl;dr = people working on the MS stack in 2009 tend to be behind in their thinking about tech. The next big thing will not be on Windows.
As for your quick meta tangent, I completely understand why the GP wrote that, it is quite normal for posts that even mention microsoft or one of their products, critically or in passing to get modded down.
A good portion of the innovation taking place these days is on the web, and the stacks at issue aren't what the client is running ("a browser") nearly as much as they are how you generate the stuff you pass over to them. (I know browser incompatibilities are a headache -- a four-figure headache for me last month, actually -- but they're quickly becoming a headache that some ubermensch JS framework author suffers so that I don't have to.)
A portion of current innovation in tech is the web stack (notably absent from your list). A portion of it is associated technologies that may not interact with the customer directly ever, such as cloud stuff (anything from S3 to Azure to VPSes). A portion of that is taking the wealth of data/apps already available and reusing it in new and innovative ways. And a portion is process innovation, which has very little to do with your technology vendor of choice and a lot to do with how you use the tools you're using.
I have never done development dedicated to a MS platform (although my Swing apps and web apps are most commonly used on them), but I'm pretty sure you can write A/B tests in .NET.
I think you get this, because you cite StackOverflow. StackOverflow could be written in any of a dozen languages, in almost any web stack. It isn't innovative because of magic that it does on the server side -- it is innovative because of how they have incentivized a community to work for them via the karma/badge system, how they work the StackOverflow-is-an-executable-advertisement-for-StackExchange business model, etc etc.