Entrepreneurs are a very special niche of market, they demand tools that allow them to bootstrap their companies fast and budget is always an important constraint.

Most of the startups choose an open source stack because of the price, open source tools  and great communities even if the technologies they choose are not better than proprietary alternatives like Microsoft. Big companies like Google have also influenced this by giving the community great tools and Api’s and with a very competitive price (sometimes free).

Microsoft has been late to the party and i see they are right now trying to get the attention of entrepreneurs in different areas:

  1. Database tools like SQL Server express
  2. IDE’s like Visual Studio Web developer Express
  3. Windows Azure and their price scheme.
  4. Programs like BizSpark

However i think they that Microsoft has to do better if they want to stop the leak of great programmers from .NET to other technologies. ( The problem here is not for Microsoft but for all of us who won’t be able to learn from them anymore because they got tired of Microsoft policies and decided to go to Ruby on rails so they stop focusing on blogging on .NET ).

Some of the current problems me and others see are:

Yes, free tools but with obvious limitations.

I know Microsoft needs to make money, and i think that corporate clients can cover this aspect, but what about giving their best tools to freelance  developers, enthusiast and startups for free?

Yes i know about BizSpark but as Rob Connery states, BizSpark only delays the payment for 3 years.. So you will still have to pay those 30000(?) dollars for Sql Server standard after 3 years or stop using it.

(Related: TekPub switch from ASP.NET MVC to Ruby on Rails and Linux because of cost projections )

I think that Microsoft thinks that by offering a limited version of Visual Studio or Sql express they will keep people happy. You may think that the 4 gigabytes limit of SQL Server express is a lot and that it is difficult to use it all, however what if your application starts to grow and you need to scale your database? bam!.. you can’t because SQL Express only supports 1 CPU and only 1GB of Ram.

You have other options like SQL Server Web Editions but as Rob Conery mentions. Why would you choose to pay if there are free alternatives with zero cost?, i think he has a point there.

Quality is not an advantage anymore. So saying that you will get a superior product won’t impress developers. They have seen great web products developed with a combination of  MySql, postgress, Rails,Linux, php etc and not that much “cool web 2.0 apps” using the Ms stack.

Azure too expensive?

I find the Tekpub a really useful example of a startup that did the math and decided to go with and open source stack (Even with their founders being great .NET developers). Rob Conery has an interesting conversation with Scottgu in twitter regarding Amazon EC2 prices vs Azure:

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And compare those 1400 with the projection of costs using Azure:

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I think that there is not much to say about it.

The important point here is that it doesn’t matter how cool or sophisticated the .NET framework is if Microsoft doesn’t make it appealing for startups and open source developers, let’s hope that the situation will get better.