Devs who love it will stick by it through thick and thin (see: WPF, Silverlight).
As someone who spends a good amount of my professional life in the Microsoft stack, let me say that there is a bit of a negative correlation going on -- the ones who have embraced Microsoft's failed initiatives (their failure predictable) have generally been, from my observations, mediocre developers. There are some core Microsoft technologies that are excellent, but there are various fire and motion initiatives that have been simply a waste of time.
Completely agree- Microsoft has solid line of business developers but their development community is sorely lacking people with rich UX skills.
Comparing the Silverlight community to the Flash community, the Silverlight community is much more concerned about architecture (MVVM, Dependency Injection, IOC, etc), while the Flash community seems to have much more of a focus on 'how to accomplish a visual effect. It's not quite that clear cut, but these are the general trends.
The other significant item is the cost to change development operating systems- Microsoft platforms have been stagnant for too long, HTML is fairly agnostic as a development platform so iOS has been pulling many people there. (Not to mention that a fair number of newer web technologies treat Windows as a second-tier platform).
Some of the larger costs for supporting development on multiple OSes, for a small company:
- Basic systems maintenance (OS licenses, user logins across machines, support, parallels?)
- Consistent development environment- sharing source control between systems, porting build/test scripts, etc
- Related tools- if you're doing a lot of UI work, may also need Photoshop or Illustrator on your new OS.
As someone who spends a good amount of my professional life in the Microsoft stack, let me say that there is a bit of a negative correlation going on -- the ones who have embraced Microsoft's failed initiatives (their failure predictable) have generally been, from my observations, mediocre developers. There are some core Microsoft technologies that are excellent, but there are various fire and motion initiatives that have been simply a waste of time.