.... Using Windows for Home Automation sounds odd to me. No windows machine I've ever had has been rock solid stable, and if it's controlling my house, then it needs to be rock solid stable.
But Windows has been pretty stable since ME (2000). That's been a decade now. Linux has improved since then too... linux was only fit for teenagers bedrooms back then.
But your home is already controlled by Microsoft Products. Your phone company, the power company, cable TV, fire, police, ALL hospitials... if your American.. even your Defense Dept and Homeland Security is windows.
Home Automation WORKS on widows products. I know many successful windows Home Automation users.... including myself.
Well, keep in mind that companies running mission critical apps in most cases are using redundant machines, clusters of boxes, load balancing, virtualization, snapshots, backup schemes, or any combination thereof to keep things running. As much as I would like to have an ESX cluster and SAN both at my house and my colo facility with block level replication, I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon.
I've been using various forms of unix on a daily basis for nearly 20 years. When I sit down at a windows machine, I often find myself wondering how the heck anyone does any real work with them. Although, my needs are different than most people's. But, I can tell you that I'm seeing a lot of companies replacing Windows servers with linux. The healthcare industry is still pretty heavily dependent on server applications that run on windows, and the ones that don't are on solaris or are really really old and run on mainframes. I know of at least one cable company that I did some work for that didn't have a single windows box in their server room, everything was linux (about 5 years ago), including their VoIP provisioning system for their digital phone service. And, I used to work for DoD, and while they did use windows, they also used a LOT of other stuff.
From about 1996 to 2000, I was strictly a Unix sysadmin. It was just me, managing just over 100 machines at one point. The windows sysadmin team had about the same number of boxes, but there were 6 of them. They ran around like chickens with their heads cut off putting out fires. The only time I ran around like that was when a drive blew up or an exploit was made public in some app I was running and I had to patch. Since I sat around doing nothing most of the day, they made me join the network team also and I just tended to the unix stuff in the rare event it needed attention.
I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that windows is more stable than unix. But, I will give you this, developing a large application for windows is much easier than developing a large application for unix. And windows programmers are a dime a dozen, so companies don't have to worry so much about their guys getting hit by buses. But development tools for unix have progressed a lot over the past few years, and it's possible to develop the majority of your app on windows or on OSX and port it to whatever flavor of unix you prefer. Plus, the Eclipse environment is great to develop in if you're into the whole Java thing.
I will also agree that home automation does clearly work on windows. But, I still reserve the right to think it would work better on linux or some flavor of BSD. At least, I know it would work better for me since I know how to quickly piece together the right tools to accomplish some bizarre task.
