"Of course, there are still more Windows developers out there than for any
other platform, but most of them are VB monkeys writing in-house glue code.
Those people are IT, not engineering and by no means your customers. They
are not going to try any piece of code before it is blessed by the trade
press and thousands of other lemmings."
Well, maybe us folks at Interliant are the exception, not the rule, but I oversee two different development groups, both of which do the mainstream of their work in Java, yet it's always on Windows platforms. The IT-oriented group develops monitoring tools, data migration scripts, billing systems, etc., mostly in Java, and my engineering group, which co-created Domino Instant! Host (see www.lotus.com/host), and is working currently on other "hosting infrastructures", does all their product development work in Java. Yet, perhaps because of our history, most all of our hosting platforms are Windows-based; not that we like it that much, but it's the reality.
However, is our counter-example significant to E? I don't know. If corporations become very, very interested in security even for their mainline business-to-business applications, and we (or, more likely, an ISV) have an an opportunity to host them, then I think yes, provided it's a mature technology. And, many many mainline applications are run on top of Windows platforms, either in the corporate or hosted environment. So, I'd suggest not excluding this part of the market.
Kevin Lacobie