Which technology ocean to swim for a software engineer, Microsoft or OpenSource/Linux

[Seregwethrin]

Hi mates,

I'm a software engineering student from Turkey and I'm trying to lead my career as best I could.

A software engineer should have knowledge of any technology, C, C++, Java, C#, Linux, Windows etc. But a human can't be a real professional at all of them. They are technology oceans continuously grow...

For a software engineering student who wants to work firstly in Australia or Canada, after if they can't happen Usa or Europe what would you suggest, trying to be a professional on Microsoft solutions like C#, .NET, Silverlight, SQL Server etc or trying to be a professional on open source solutions like Linux, Java, MySQL etc...

For example in Turkey C# is more widely used than Java. Corporates prefer Microsoft solutions. What about the countries I've listed above..?
What would you suggest, what would be your opinion?

Also please consider this question in a long time period like 2-3 years, not just for now because everything changes rapidly in software technologies. (I've written this because Microsoft is in a attack of developing new and good technologies.)

[Khiem]

Do you know why OpenSource exists ?
Let's take a note about compilers, you can compare MS's compiler with that of GNU's
For a good software product, its' better to have a good GUI, multiple functionalities that are common and easy to use. I call it good because there should be other competitive products that are worse or under development. Advertising alone is not enough to get the product hit the worldwide market, there should be similar but ... bad ones for users to have a feel of the difference. Whatever you choose to use, you'll be warned of the targeted audience for your final results along with other possible consequences during and after product release. MS is world wide not in the US only, many people favor MS for their development solution, which indicates their global influences; and the C# part as I say, MS provides users intellisense, code profile, better GUI helpers etc leading to ease of use, many might pick C# over Java for that, yet to mention its popular use in Web solutions

[Ledidas]

A software engineer should have knowledge of any technology, C, C++, Java, C#, Linux, Windows etc. But a human can't be a real professional at all of them. They are technology oceans continuously grow...
For a software engineering student who wants to work firstly in Australia or Canada, after if they can't happen Usa or Europe what would you suggest, trying to be a professional on Microsoft solutions like C#, .NET, Silverlight, SQL Server etc or trying to be a professional on open source solutions like Linux, Java, MySQL etc...
For example in Turkey C# is more widely used than Java. Corporates prefer Microsoft solutions. What about the countries I've listed above..?
What would you suggest, what would be your opinion?

I am not in the US/Canada/Australia, but as a common point I have for Opensources, I think big/large Open Source products/projects are coming from North America, many people certainly use them. MS products are more preferable because of many reasons (as Khiem says), I can also think of their trustworthy trademark around the globe. Trust is the first thing for doing business successfully.

Human brain is just like a software's internal logic. In order for the software to grow, it needs many important elements included during designs and development such as maintainablitily, reusability etc, many of which are meant to be for future updates. Our visual memory plays a central part for us to memorise things, so as to update our knowledge about them too.
Therefore it is us that make the technology grow, not that we grow by it.