You couldn't buy the VS licenses + SQL Server + Windows Server with the money YCombinator provides you.
So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup.
So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup.
Not every startup has to work with the small amount YC hands out. I know of a fair amount of startups using an MS stack, and they are doing very well. Of course, they are not SV cool, but they are making good money. You should sit back and analyze what you just said, because it is a pretty strange point to make.
In my last employer (government), we didn't choose .NET, microsoft won the contracts. In the last update when I still worked there, we spent 250k USD to update our programmers VS to 2010 + windows 7. (I wonder if they will now update again). SQL Server prices are similar to oracle's with similar features.
In my startup (not a startup anymore) I had to spend 40k just to get the environment needed for a project (involving telephony) the only reason we had to use .NET was because the hardware manufacturer only provided driver+tooling for windows and some components were exclusively for .NET. Because we mostly use linux and macs, we also had to buy windows licenses. In my country, a Windows 8 license cost almost 2x the minimum wage.
We happened to have a discussion if we should give up or not a specific product because of the microsoft taxation on our business. The only reason we decided to keep using .NET is the cheap labor and the lack of hardware suppliers willing to provide us drivers and tools for linux.
So yes, microsoft damages not only startups, but companies in general.
Oracle (DB product) is the wrong choice for most startups, I actually wrote a post about that some time ago: http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/1/this-is-why-y...
(a) The money YC is giving isn't intended to solve capex problems like this. It's meant to make the first couple months of getting a minimal offering viable for small early teams. In the YC model, if the problem your business solves involves significant capex costs, you use YC to match your company with a next round of investors to handle that problem.
(b) The reality is that you do get enough money to fund a .NET stack when you get into YC, because YC comes with an assurance of immediate follow-on convertible note investment.
Neither of these two points makes .NET a better choice for early-stage startups than Rails or Django or PHP; Microsoft has to smooth over the expense problem with programs like Bizspark.
How you would do a startup in a world without BSD and Linux, just with commercial vendors?
There are more out there than just Apple and Microsoft.
In any case, if you want to work with the best tools, sometimes you have to pay a premium to get them. That's either damaging to people who can't/won't pay the money or it's an advantage for those with enough confidence in what they're doing to make the investment, depending on which side of the line you're on.
Prime example: Stackoverflow/StackExchange is built on the Microsoft stack.
>This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers.
Would you hold Google to the same standard and say that's true of their free Google Apps for education and how they use free email to sign you into Google.com so they can track you across different PCs?
If not, cool. But if so, would be good to be clear. You've suddenly become very active with what I'd consider an overly Microsoft approach (looking at your comments from the past few hours).
(ex 'softie here).
Please explain. The rules seem pretty simple to me and certainly something every company can follow:
- Privately held.
- Less than 3 years old.
- Earning less than $1 million per year.
- Developing software.
Disclaimer: BizSpark member.
While I suppose in theory Joel could have thrown a lot of money away just because it didn't happen that way. Stack Overflow was running on it's own income until the first round of funding ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-... ), excepting the pre-launch period (everyone might have just taken equity then, I don't know I wasn't around until just before the series A). I think it was mostly ad income, though Careers ( http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ ) was around fairly early too.
Disclaimer: Stack Exchange employee
Stack Exchange is cool and everything, but it didn't have the same difficulties that face most bootstrapped startups.