As a business owner you need to watch your overhead cost. I'm sure you may have noticed that Micro$oft embraces planned obsolescence and constantly delivers new flawed products to the market requiring updates and patches until it is discovered that a total re-write is required. Now I will admit that some of the operating systems needed re-writing because new hardware but that ended with win95.
Windows 2000 was by far the best product produced by M$ but they quickly realized that if they continued to update this product they would loose billions. They needed to separate the technologies so they could charge more for these technologies. HOME BASIC, HOME PREMIUM, HOME SERVER AND ENTERPRISE.
I've been working with the inner workings of computers for 30 years, hardware and software alike. I have stayed current as a matter of interest and have kept a close eye on the internet technologies ever since the government released it to the public. The academic community designed the base structures as open source. These technologies have been and remain the back bone of the internet. All I have seen out of Redmond is M$ taking open source code, changing it enough to claim some sort of patent then charging for it. None of the code from M$ is cleaner, more secure or faster then what you find in the open source community.
Now don't get me wrong here. M$ made computing what it is today by creating a mass market for PC's bringing the prices down so most of us can afford a PC. I have used All of the Windows OS's and learn them inside out because I am a PC tech as well. BUT M$ is trying push it's way into a market that has been and continues to flourish on the Net's backbone Unix technologies. MS IIs servers are slow and so cluttered with extra garbage no one needs it's beyond me why anyone would want to use them.
I was able to see the difference when I was involved with U-Haul and U.S. Cellular. U-Haul used Microsoft asp where U.S.Cellular used Linux, PHP and Java. The Linux system preformed twice as fast as the M$ system. Another point I would like to make is both of the local hospitals evaluated Linux and MS based servers and both decided to go with Linux because it was able to render X-Ray images among other data 8 times faster then MS. They use special form programs on their Windows laptops to transfer the data to the faster Linux servers.
In closing I love Widows on my PC's but I want them off of servers, especially on the WWW it's getting slow enough during peak hours as it is.
David M. Yonke PC Specialist and Web Developer