In a word: Performance

Look at any site running ASP with a large number of concurrent users and the performance will be abysmal. A case in point is Microsoft's site itself, even the fairly simple pages take an age to appear in full. And they wrote the stuff, they should know how to optimise it, and have every incentive to show how good it is(!)

Compare that to sites running perl under mod_perl with similar connections to the Web.

If the marketing is to be beleived, this will all change with .NET, at least the way this is being implemented should cure the problems with ASP and beat JSP in terms of performance too. And we'll be able to program Perl natively into .NET through VS.NET, so none of the other problems noted in this thread. Except of course being bound to IIS: .NET framework for Apache anyone?

-- iakobski