Rick Belluzzo, former COO of Microsoft®, stated in an Infoconomy article, "Microsoft has a lot of work to do to make Windows as powerful and flexible as the combination of Linux and some of these other tools [such as IBM WebSphere]."
Dr. Jim Gray and Dr. Gordon Bell, very highly respected scientists at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, recommend the use of cheap Linux Beowulf clusters for supercomputing over larger high performance hardware. [NY Times]
"I used to be a program manager at Microsoft, and there's a really strong tendency in that culture to treat customer requests as fun intellectual challenges to be fended off like exercises in debating class... I'm forced to conclude that Microsoft has grown so large they are living in a reality-distortion field. I suppose it's not unusual for someone working on a campus with 45 buildings all full of Microsoft employees to lose track of what the outside world is thinking and doing." -
Joel Spolsky