Amazon has very good .NET support. So does Rackspace. So does Azure (obviously). In my personal experience the quality of cloud platforms has been comparable for both Linux and Windows environments. Is there any evidence that .NET cloud platforms are of lower quality? I'm genuinely interested. Please elaborate.

Personally, I doubt there is a real quality problem with those platforms. But running .NET on those platforms looks unnecessarily expensive to me. If I were married to Microsoft (as SO is) then I would avoid 'the cloud' for that reason.

Given that one wishes to use Windows/.NET, I feel the decision follows pretty naturally from an analysis of costs - no vague argument about culture necessary

I would say cost (referring to license fees) is more relevant in deciding whether or not to choose the .NET stack in the first place. You're not going to avoid license fees by avoiding the cloud.

Their culture argument is a funny one. But I have no beef with it. If owning and tinkering with the hardware makes them happy, more power to them.

As an aside, I've been using Azure lately for my .NET projects. MSFT has done a nice job with that platform and don't get enough credit for it IMHO. I especially like SQL Azure.

competition isn't required for quality.

Of course it is.

If there is no competition, you can get by with a crappy product or service if your client need it.

You're arguing that competition is sufficient for quality, not that it's necessary. The first vendor might choose to provide a high quality product regardless, which could, in itself, provide a barrier to entry preventing competition.

The real win of competition is that it allows a market to be commoditized, at which point it actually operates like we all learned in our Econ 101 class.

I think droz mean "You don't need competition to do a good job" rather than "It's better to have competition when you want buy something of quality".

But in either case, sometimes, competition lowers at the same time the price and the quality. So competition doesn't necessarily increase quality.

I wouldn't say that it is required, simply that it is more likely to improve quality.