The point being, "no open source community", "license costs" (see bizspark), the "MS is a desktop stack" are all popular myths that haven't been relevant for years.
But your point of well defined, independent services is spot on.
I didn't say "no open source community"; I said super small open source community compared to almost every major alternative. That isn't a myth. It's reality. Moreover Java has a lot more big projects that .NET just doesn't cover. Not to mention we're ignoring the tons of stuff you can find in Ruby, Python, and even PHP.
The point being, "no open source community", "license costs" (see bizspark), the "MS is a desktop stack" are all popular myths that haven't been relevant for years.
But your point of well defined, independent services is spot on.