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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

I stopped reading at "We specialise in Microsoft platforms".

A lot of businesses use Microsoft platforms, and make a hell of a lot of money doing so.

Not to mention that Microsoft has come a long, long way since VB6 -- C# is a respectable language, ASP.NET MVC works pretty damn well (it powers Stack Overflow), and many of their lightweight dev products (SQL Server Express) are free-as-in-beer.

I may be a Unix guy, but I've still got a healthy amount of respect for what you can do on the Windows platform, even though it's not as 'cool' as an iPhone, Rails, or whatever-else-is-popular-right-now.

No offence meant edw519, but i thought it might be good to reproduce their entire text here, so that people like me who often read comments first might get a better picture.

  It’s got to be software aimed at software developers or sysadmins. 
  We specialise in Microsoft platforms, but will consider others too.

No offense taken.

I stand by my original comment.

If they specialize in Microsoft, that's all I need to know. I'm not interested, no matter what they have to say after the "but".

Microsoft software: That's where some money is. Especially on the Desktop.

"That's where some money is."

Not for me.

I don't object to Microsoft because of personal preference. I object because of software quality. Which translates into, "less money for me".

Without exception, every experience I've had with a customer who had Microsoft products on their server has been profoundly negative. I've had to account for things I would never dream of in a "-ux" environment. I have to regularly stop and deal with things normally outside my control. Which slows down progress and diverts attention from the critical path. In addition, these customers "think differently". I can't quite put my finger on it, but they just don't see possibilities they've never experienced.

So when someone says that they specialize in Microsoft, I have only 2 thoughts:

1. Good luck to them.

2. Not interested.

That's surely a rational response. I took care to write "some money" not "all money".

I'm not sure about that. Piracy of Windows desktop/end-user software is rampant. Maybe it's less for Windows server-related software?

Piracy is rampant but a lot of people and especially businesses don't want to be pirates. A lot of software businesses have been successful in making casual piracy difficult and confining piracy to places (usenet, hacker-or porn- themed websites, bittorrent, limewire) that most of their target customer won't feel comfortable going. They can't absolutely stop piracy but they can make it a lot less appetizing than the "all you can eat for free" that it used to be.

That's not something to brag about.

Nor are $80 PDFs on how to raise one's parakeet. But, it's apparently a profitable business. By choosing MS platforms, those users have already signaled that they're willing to pay for software. That's not a bad market to target.

From a marketing standpoint (as well as R&D), this is rational. Common marketing mechanisms for software like this are very segregated -- Hardly any conference interesting to people using Open Source stacks will have much Microsoft content, and vice versa. Blogs, magazines, etc. are all similar in this regard. So, the marginal cost of marketing another developer utility for the MS platform will be much lower than the cost of marketing the first, say, DB2 utility acquired.

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