We all know that Windows is the workhorse of the workplace. Understanding why helps make the case for why you should build your web application on Windows.

To paraphrase the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Windows is big. Really big. Windows has been expanding for over 20 years and, believe it or not, that expansion has been largely dictated by what large customers of Windows wanted. This means that buried within Windows are literally millions of things you can do programatically. In constrast, OsX has been expanding for about 10 years now, and that expansion is largely dictated by what small customers want. Throughout OsX one encounters cases where it's possible to click but not script your way through and interaction. While Linux has been expanding for roughly 40 years, it's been largely expanding based off of the needs of the developers working on individual parts. This means that many parts overlap and do not usually play well together. To get a simple idea of just how big Windows is, a box with nothing than Windows, Office, and Skype contains roughly:

3000 COM Objects

7000 WMI Classes

30000 .NET Classes

Put another way, Windows has 40,000 fairly well structured solutions right out of the box, not counting the tens of thousands of small C operations that you can do. Since Apple and Linux have no mechanism for discoverying programmatic capabilites on a machine, there isn't even a way of knowning how large the gap is.

Not only are there so many solutions built into the box of Windows, there's an astounding amount of documentation about most of the capabilities of the operating system. This means that there's a considerably higher chance of being able to actually write a complex application at all.