>>>One code base on multiple platforms = chaos.
>
>Why? We've known for years that standardization is a first step towards quality. Software development uniquely insists on behaving like an artisan cottage industry rather than a grown-up profession focused on quality and automation of repetitive tasks. It's as if car manufacturers insisted on the practice (and cost) of assembling vehicles by hand, rather than only Rolls Royces for people who value that sort of thing. In 2015 you can visit modern car factories and you'll see a handful of supervizing humans, none of whom are working directly on a production line. Software development? Mostly done by self-proclaimed artists who scoff at automation and celebrate their fascinating variability.

Software development artistry/lack of standardization - there's a consequence of that which is not always recognized. In a lot of small custom software projects, and even some medium-sized ones there is a core of a few people, perhaps just one, who know how it really works.

This makes people nervous. If they have a product in, say, VFP and that person gets hit by a bus...

So, they want to switch to, say, .NET. In a new company another small core team will be assigned to the project. Once that project is complete that team will move on to something else. As the years go by they may even leave the company. Or the original work may have been outsourced.

If there isn't a *lot* of standardization in how the project is completed, then the cost of getting new people up to speed is huge.

If one language/platform is more widely used than another then that can certainly make a difference in finding developers in the first place, but the cost of getting new people up to speed is likely to be there whether you switch or not.