Windows or Linux? .NET or Java? Oracle or Sql Server? The technical debate rages on. However, which software platform you end up building your application in has very little to do with the technical arguments for or against.

Why shouldn’t the debate be a technical decision? Don’t some platforms perform better than others? Yes – some platforms do perform better than others but the performance differences are usually so minor as to be trivial. Most importantly, there are so many other factors that go into the performance of the application as to render technical performance at the software platform level a relative non-factor.

A holistic view

I have a holistic view of application performance. For me, application performance includes not only how quickly pages are rendered, but also release resource and opportunity cost, maintenance resource and opportunity cost, and hosting costs. Basically, if it has to do with the application and can cost your business money, I include it in application performance – because after all, the only thing that REALLY matters is the bottom-line of your business.

Application performance is affected by the following factors in no particular order:
- Application design and architecture
- Experience, tenacity, drive, and versatility of your developers
- Application scalability
- Code efficiency
- Code standardization and naming conventions
- Hosting costs
There can also be many other factors that affect application performance.

The real application costs

The point is that when choosing a software platform there is not necessarily a "right" answer because the factors are different for every business. When building and maintaining an application, the factors that will end up costing you the most time, money, and opportunity have nothing to do with which software platform the application is built on and everything to do with the people that are building and maintaining it.