

Microsoft's BizSpark, In First 30 Days, Reaches Thousands of Startups - gthuang
http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/12/09/microsofts-bizspark-program-in-first-30-days-reaches-thousands-of-startups-developers/

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snowbird122
This is a smart move for Microsoft. They should have done this about 10 years
ago though.

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socratees
@snowbird122, yeah its a smart move, but i bet majority of YCombinator type
start-ups will not choose Microsoft. atleast i think so.

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kleneway
Why not? Not disagreeing, genuinely curious what your thoughts are.

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kqr2
It will be interesting to see how many startups succeed using this program.
Since startups often employ tools for competitive advantage, this will be a
good test between the microsoft and open source tool chains.

Also, as pg's essay points out, great hackers like to work with great tools /
languages, so it will be interesting to see if they can recruit the right
talent.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html>

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azsromej
I'm using BizSpark to get access to tools so I can develop some Office plugins
and related msi installers. In such a situation, the greatest competitive
advantage is found using their tools. And, in general, you should be able to
use any language that targets the CLR.

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kragen
"Competitive advantage" means roughly "doing things your competitors can't".
You can't do that with off-the-shelf tools unless your competitors are in
Nigeria and can't afford them.

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azsromej
you can do it with off-the-shelf tools if your competitors decide to use
really "hackerish" languages and tools and end up taking longer to produce the
same or lesser product.

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mooneater
Azure, great. Let me know what its called next month.

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chollida1
What sort of things do you like about it compared to Amazon and Google's
offerings?

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mooneater
What I meant was, Microsoft is always changing and renaming things. I would
not be surprised if "Azure" will have a new name, new group, new PUM, new
logo, and a new API next month. If its still here at all. That's one reason
learning Microsoft tools gives me a headache. By comparison, the *NIX toolset
is relatively stable.

Their constantly shifting brands etc. matches how they are constantly
reorganizing their groups internally. Its an endless shuffle game and a lot is
lost in the churn.

Nevertheless they pull in the $$$!

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utsmokingaces
Anyone tell me the advantages of using .NET for a scrappy web startup?

I learn to develope in ASP.NET in college and found that finding support
online is quite difficult (damn gridview).

With the maturity of Django, RoR, and PhP frameworks is it worth it to find a
bizspark partner and pay microsoft tax until the your business dies?

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henryl
Visual Studio cannot be beaten, especially when free. C# is evolving towards
better support for concurrency and functional style programming. F# is getting
much acclaim even from die hard critics of .NET. You can use one framework for
your entire application--be it frontend (ASP.NET MVC), backend, enterprise,
even distributed computing on Amazon (MPI.NET). An added bonus is that the
majority of professional programmers out there are familiar with .NET in case
you ever need to hire (this is slightly more true outside the realm of web
development and silicon valley).

Regarding support online, I've never had a problem self learning .NET,
especially with MSDN, the ASP.NET community at large, and now
stackoverflow.com.

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gruseom
_Visual Studio cannot be beaten._

Visual Studio is a provincial piece of work that can't even get its imitations
right - viz. the need for plugins (Resharper) to bring it up to minimal
acceptability. The only people I know who praise Visual Studio are the ones
who believe that Microsoft is responsible for all computing innovation.

(Though I seem to recall that as a C++ environment 10 years ago it was pretty
good.)

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socratees
@gruseom, yeah you put that in right words, i agree!!!

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drwh0
msft, please get in line behind sun's opensolaris, under the sign that says
"CAN'T EVEN GIVE IT AWAY"

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chollida1
Really?

Here is the profit(not revenue) filed under their latest annual report for
their server and tools division, the exact software you are claiming they
can't "give away"

Server and Tools: 4,261(2008) 3,593(2007) 2,980(2006)

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viggity
Do you have URL I can look at for more numbers like those?

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chollida1
I got them from the Microsoft website. They post all their filings on it.

If you really want a day with numbers then I'd start here:
<http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/index.html>

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viggity
cool, thanks

