Solid Servers
While Microsoft seems to be taking a real hammering on the client side of the ecosystem, I think the server side is actually pretty solid. While the stupid Metro start menu made it's way into the Server 2012 UI, the server manager is really nice. IIS is solid and the .NET 4.5 framework is awesome with the enhancements made for parallelism and other such things.
Using SQL Server, IIS and .NET you can build a solid foundation as a back-end for just about any front end you like from .NET WinForms/WPF to HTML5 to iOS and Android apps.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
