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Comment by BlakePetersen | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, working with any vendors from the pacific northwest, they're all MS shops. Is this trend changing considering the added expense of working with any MS Licensed software (where an OSS solution with little or no cost could suffice)? Does MS offer incentives to local startups to build their platform on existing licensed MS products? Or is it more of a Seattle Pride thing? I personally don't feel the MS Business model is one the works well for scrappy young start-ups, yet pretty much every company in the Pac Nor Dub I've worked is completely MS'd out.

I didn't even know there was a MS service called Lync until we did a training with Mercent (FYI, Lync doesn't work on Linux, I was shocked too).

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I thought I would throw out a counter-example using my own startup. We're a 4 year old profitable company with a handful of full-time engineers and sales employees. We're located in Utah. We're based on .NET and host everything using Windows Azure. We leveraged the BizSpark program a few years ago which gave us access to a lot of free software and services.

It helps that we're a B2B company with decent and predictable revenue. I imagine it's a bit harder to afford things if your company is some new free photo sharing mobile app. I have no problems investing money in technology and tools if it accelerates our development and has a good ROI.

I also personally love the C# language.

Great feedback. Thank you!

I think you may be generalizing from your experience. Just looking at some of the openings for these companies they are looking for MongoDB, HTML5, Rails, etc. I didn't see any mention C# or other MS specific things.

Yea, my specific instances may be speaking to too narrow of a sampling of Seattle Start-up scene, and it may be that the vendors we do business with are a bit more mature than what is featured here.

Mainly, I was wondering if there is any sort of outreach by MS to any of these small companies. I know they have a presence in the Valley and have MS Ventures to nurture fledgling companies with start-up capital, but as far as strategizing to keep new companies in their ecosystem long-term, I was curious to see what sort of efforts they are putting forth to address this.

As someone else mentioned already, BizSpark: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

I've worked both in the Valley and in Seattle, and in my experience the startup mentalities have been pretty much the same. There may be a lot of former MS people working at the startup, but they don't seem to have any attachment to it. If iOS or Android are where the numbers are, that's where they go. I've also never met a startup in Seattle solely focused on developing something for MS, although there probably are some that exist. Whatever trend you saw in the northwest previously must have changed, from my limited perspective.

You are probably correct in that the trend has changed. My feeling is that it may be that the companies we do business with are a bit more established and they may still be subject to the decisions made during a trend-phase that doesn't really make financial sense to step away from and build again from scratch, but if those decisions were made now, it may be taken in a different direction.

But the fact that they no longer have such a strong foothold in their home turf is a bit concerning for MS I'm sure. That's why I was curious to see whether there was any effort on MS's part to change their approach and invest more in grassroot business building that will establish those long lasting relationships with brands that will be both valuable and recognizable in the future.

They are doing some things. They sponsor some startup events, and try to get people to use Windows Azure (which is actually quite nice) to compete with AWS (also Seattle). However, I think the reputation of Microsoft as the "Big Evil" is pretty hard for them to overcome. I think people tend to roll their eyes at them when they try to get into the startup space.

That being said, the other giant here, Amazon, seems to be doing just fine with their reputation.

Employees from both companies are common in the startup land here, having jumped ship to go on their own.

The "added expense of MS software" is largely a myth. Windows is about 30% more expensive on AWS than Linux, and most startup expenses are dominated by payroll, not hosting. Choosing a platform on price in this situation is counterproductive - you should chose whatever allows you to iterate faster until your product idea sticks with your customers. As a rule that's a platform you know the best, can find help for most readily, and can hire new team members the fastest. Hiring for Microsoft stack in Seattle is easier than in most other places.

I say "largely" because occasional startup will be maxing out their hardware trying to build next Google or next Netflix. If hosting can become comparable to payroll in your startup, then it becomes a factor in the platform choice.

If that wasn't enough, Microsoft has Bizspark program where the give you a ton of stuff for free for startups.

Blake, you're right that the vast majority of PNW _vendors_ (i.e. technology service providers) are MS shops. That's because almost all (at least 95%) of the vendor ecosystem here is supporting Microsoft or clients Microsoft directly connects vendors with. (We're primarily a non-Microsoft vendor - we'll do MS-based development if required, but we don't choose it for new projects, and 95%+ of our work is on Linux - but we are one of a very few exceptions at any scale.)

As noted by others, _startups_ - being created from scratch by people choosing their tools - absolutely use a wide variety of platforms. I expect that the numbers would bear out a higher percentage of Microsoft-based startups than in other locations (and there are a number of successful startups in the Seattle area with Microsoft-based platforms), but it's certainly not a significant majority.

I was expressly hired at my current gig (re-startup) in Pioneer Square to migrate from an existing .NET solution to JVM on AWS with a heavy Cassandra component (all on Linux). I started a company up here some years ago and we opted for the Windows platform due to the availability of talent. I think that has changed in recent years, and I feel like the Seattle startup scene these days has a really healthy balance of a lot of different technologies.

Living in Seattle and having worked with numerous companies I'm going to happily contest this: Your statement is simply not true, all the way around.

As someone who seems to have a lot of insight into this, to the best of your knowledge, could you speak to what factors would most heavily influence this decision (in the context of being made by a founder in Seattle)?

Was MS never even in the running or could it possibly boil down to the cost issue I touched on or perhaps that founders or early engineers chose a different route due to past personal exposure (and would you feel that the financial barrier of entry is a factor in limiting these engineers to this MS software exposure)?

Would have a bit of incentives from MS like reduced license costs steered those early conversations in a different direction or is it simply that the software they offer isn't up to snuff with your particular use cases?

Not to sound snarky, but it comes down to the simple fact that Seattle is a major American city, with many many many people, and is riding upon an internet wave that excludes no one. Your argument may apply historically, but now --definitely not. Everyone is simply doing their own thing, incentives or not.

Thanks for the feedback, that definitely seems like the consensus.

This is simply not true. Most of the startups here (including mine) run on linux and all the engineers have macs.

Thanks, I think my initial comment was a bit misguided and the feedback here has definitely made me reconsider my preconceptions.

However, it should be noted that Macs make for amazing Windows machines.

They also make really great Linux machines. :D

The most definitely do!

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