

Microsoft to support startups with free software/support - tialys
http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/BizSpark/Pages/At_a_Glance.aspx

======
aschobel
This seems like a no brainer for any startup since they give you a free MSDN
Premium subscription, which means you get a copy of MS Office, Exchange and
Dynamics.

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite with MSDN Premium is usually
$10,939. [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/subscriptions/subscriptionsc...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/subscriptions/subscriptionschart.aspx)

That is a lot of software.

Kudos to Microsoft.

~~~
cabalamat
For $0 I can get Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, Java,
MediaWiki, Mailman, Wordpress, OpenOffice, etc, etc.

With Microsoft, after 3 years, you have to start paying for everything. With
the software I've listed above, I'll never be forced to cough up money for it,
and I'll never be subject to vendor lock-in.

Microsoft's initial price of $0 looks attractive, but you'll never own the
software so you have to factor in the Total Costs of Non-Ownership: they want
to make you dependent on them so they can jack up their prices.

Most startups use Free Software running on a GNU/Linux platform, and
Microsoft's BizSpark program is clearly a response to this. But people don't
use Free Software because it's cheap, they use it because it's better -- which
is why BizSpark will fail.

The BizSpark process also seems overly bureaucratic and there are questions as
to what actually you are allowed to do with the software MS provide -- for my
full review to BizSpark see
[http://www.includipedia.com/blog/2008/11/05/microsoft-
bizspa...](http://www.includipedia.com/blog/2008/11/05/microsoft-bizspark-for-
startups.html)

~~~
aschobel
Technically you don't own FLOSS software either, never having to pay a license
fee is very attractive.

Free is nice, but we still pay for commercial software. We spend $600 for each
license of IntelliJ because it woks better for us than Eclipse.

Also, in the end you want to build something people want.

If you have a bunch of engineers who are good at .Net, why not use the
Microsoft stack to get that done quickly? Go out and build!

~~~
cabalamat
_Technically you don't own FLOSS software either_

True: own can mean the ability to do with it as you will, or the ability to
exclude others from it. With FLOSS you can do the first but not the second.

 _If you have a bunch of engineers who are good at .Net, why not use the
Microsoft stack to get that done quickly_

Indeed why not? Microsoft may be the best a platform if that's what your
experience is in. Though it seems to me that most innovations in software
technologies seems to be Open Source these days, e.g. Rails, Django, Clojure.
The only closed source thing seems to be C#.

Though maybe I am biased because the Microsoft/.Net side of things is
something I don't follow -- for example I've no idea if there's a Microsoft/C#
equivalent of Ruby on Rails.

~~~
aschobel
I agree, that's why we extensively use FLOSS. It is nice being use the same
innovations that power Google (Guice), Yahoo (Hadoop), Facebook (Thrift).

I have a friend who does a lot of C# and he claims there are some really
interesting things going on over there. F#, automatic parallelization in the
CLR, FP goodness in C#.

Meh, I'd rather deploy and use open tools and platforms.

------
tialys
Seems like a cool offering if you REALLY need Windows, the $100 dropout fee
seems kind of strange though. I might hop in just to get access to some of the
technology -- some of those things are simply too expensive to try otherwise.

