I'd have to imagine such things exist, (I mean, come on it's 2016 there has to be a reasonable alternative to Exchange at least by now, and something a little better than raw LDAP for user management, right?) I just cut my teeth on a MS environment and don't yet see anything comparable.

Personally, given the choice I would prefer to start a new web API project in .NET because I feel most productive in that environment.

Combine that with a need (for whatever reason) to run .NET & IIS and it can definitely make sense to start running some Nano containers.

They can use it for ActiveDirectory, and it help them reduce IT department costs: a Windows Desktop SysAdmin can easily manage a Windows Server.

Getting Linux would require them to hire new specialists.

You don't bother trying to decide what webserver to use. You just add the web server role, and you have iis.

It's pretty easy to manage.

Well, back in the day, I preferred Windows Server 2K3 because I could actually address more than 4GB RAM on a 32-bit architecture, and worked great for running my Q3 servers (and games played quite well on 2K3.)

somebody recently told a story of 2 cloned vm machines, the same hardware and configuration. same updates installed on both. one did not start up correctly, other one runs smoothly.

windows platform is way more unpredictable then any other system i worked with.

I can't say I've every had that happen to me or anyone else I've dealt with. Do you have any references to relevant bugs/issues? A properly running package manager should not allow this unless there is a serious bug in the packages themselves.

The closest I can think of otherwise is someone getting locked out of a remote machine where root was the only active account and was authenticated buy user/pass not by key, and he accepted the "start blocking password logins for root" change in a distribution upgrade (so he was warned so his own fault!).

I've never had that happen, but thankfully remote (virtual) serial consoles are commonplace. Something I wish was more common in Windows environments, as I've had remote access dump on Windows many times, leaving me with no options other than a long drive or call in to a remote DC.