You are definitely on to something here. In an enterprise IT environment, reliability is extremely important. And it has to be achieved without breaking the bank. I don't think that either Windows or Linux is just "generally more suited" to today's IT landscape; each offers its own distinct pros and cons, and selecting the appropriate solution needs to be done on a case by case basis. In your case it was Linux. That's absolutely fine. It's also possible you might have chosen a modern version of Windows and been successful as well. But if you were using Windows 98, I bet you would have had some real issues living up to to your SLA.

Another important issue is manageability. When large numbers of machines are present, auotmation of administration can really cut labor costs, improve support, and generally enhance the end user experience. With the right planning, nowadays you can plug a new machine into the network and go home. By the time you return in the morning, it will have booted over the network to a Windows installer, installed Windows with the appropriate drivers, installed all software appropriate for the machine (based on departmental association, etc), fully patched itself, and will have received all the appropriate customizations (restrictions, etc.). Anyone boasting the excellence of Windows 9x, or even its adequacy, has probably never been charged with managing a large network. This kind of functionality just didn't exist in that era. Modern versions of Windows contain a lot of technologies that make this scenario possible.

Sure, people have been deploying disk images over the network for years, but that becomes a huge hassle when different images must be developed for different departments or the underlying hardware changes.

--Sasha Jevtic