
Where did the Microsoft tech stack disappear? - eadmund
https://michaelscodingspot.com/2018/07/30/where-did-the-microsoft-tech-stack-disappear/
======
ehnto
Excluding 77 of the results because they were PHP and so probably "weren't
software at all" is silly, to be polite. I understand the assumption is that
they are probably ecommerce frameworks or WordPress sites but a) that's a
pretty bad assumption and b) for an eCommerce framework, how is that not just
part of the stack like any other framework? They are never off the shelf
solutions at that scale, and surely it would be interesting to note that a
majority of the top 100 were using a particular framework in the stack.

~~~
InclinedPlane
All the more condescending considering some of the biggest software companies
in the world (such as facebook) use PHP.

~~~
BillinghamJ
What Facebook use these days is a long way away from PHP. Hack is quite
different in various non-trivial ways.

The more typical “99th percentile” PHP is not used by any of the biggest tech
companies to deliver their core products.

~~~
lucideer
> _Hack is quite different in various non-trivial ways_

[citation needed]. In what non-trivial ways is Hack different to PHP?

Of the three distinguishing features highlighted on
[https://hacklang.org/](https://hacklang.org/), PHP has two (the exception is
generics, which I don't think PHP has added... yet).

~~~
conradfr
Hack has async.

------
eksemplar
It didn’t, it’s the backbone of a lot of enterprise companies and
organizations that aren’t primarily focused on tech. Like most of the European
public sector.

Coincidentally, companies that aren’t tech companies rarely share their tech
stacks, because why would they? Technology isn’t what they are selling and IT
people are the guys who tell you to reboot every time you call them, even if
that’s not really true.

Take the municipality where I work as an example. I manage several software
developers, and we’ve build around 400 minor systems and services over the
past decade. Last year when I was working on my masters in public
administration I discussed our in-house development with one our eight CEOs.
This is the guy in charge of efficiency, which is where my digitization
department resides, and while he knows me and what my department does in
general terms, he was surprised to learn that we develop software ourselves.

It’s different for Netflix and Airbnb, because they are tech companies and I’m
fairly certain their CEOs know that they employ actual software developers. ;)

That’s the public sector, but look up Volkswagen, Maersk or similar and notice
how they don’t have entries?

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a2tech
It’s the licensing. It’s always been the licensing. The cost is untenable for
startups (and yes I’m aware of the various bizspark and developer offerings).
Those special deals are awesome in the beginning but they have nasty teeth
when you’re two years in and you’ve just started to get traction and out of
the blue you need to pony up for sql server or windows licenses.

~~~
hackits
SQL Server/Windows Licenses costs shouldn't really be a problem if you've
factor them into your business plan and expenses. The businesses that get into
trouble are the ones that naively assume software is free.

~~~
wenc
SQL Server and Windows licensing are actually major inhibitors, even at large
enterprises. We have to manage our VL/CALs conservatively to control costs.

Wanna spin up n VMs for production / distributed computing? For Windows, you
have to license each VM, whereas with Linux, the incremental cost of another
node is nearly 0.

(Side note: I had high hopes for container support on Windows Server 2016
because unlike OS's, containers don't require individual licensing.
Unfortunately Windows Containers are still immature, and are ironically
second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem compared to Linux containers)

Wanna spin up a n database servers? A single SQL Server (Enterprise) instance
is pretty pricey (and it's licensed per core, minimum 4), whereas Postgres is
free for any number of users and any number of processor cores. You want
several replicas of your SQL Server? It is $$$. With MySQL, every replica is
free license-wise (there are other costs of course).

The cloud has changed these calculations somewhat, but if your infrastructure
is on-prem, Microsoft licensing can be prohibitive at scale.

~~~
__sr__
Do not forget — Microsoft licence costs also increase with the number of CPU
cores in your server.

In addition to costs themselves, Microsoft licensing is a highly complex
topic. One of my colleagues who deals with Microsoft jokes that someone well
versed with MS licensing deserves a PhD. A lot of people simply don’t want to
deal with all that when they have a thousand other things to worry about.

~~~
angry_octet
And because of the cost the accountants demand tight centralised control,
which ends up being slow and unresponsive, and you find yourself spinning
(emailing, writing business cases, managing and reporting expenditure) instead
of doing. It is a huge negative.

~~~
__sr__
The horror! Fill gazillions of forms in triplicate and get them approved
before we’d let you do anything useful.

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mattferderer
If one could bet money & not just time/effort/knowledge on tech stacks,
Microsoft's would be a great discount right now.

They've been employing large amounts of very well known devs to become dev
advocates in every popular language/field out there.

Visual Studio Code has overtaken Sublime & Atom as the most popular text
editor in just about any demo I see in most front side web development.

MS is now friends & compatible with many of the other cool tools out there.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, etc. A lot of demos I see use .NET with PostgreSQL
on Linux.

If you've never used Visual Studio's Full IDE or Azure or the .NET framework,
you're missing out on some huge productivity gains. I use JavaScript more than
.NET. I'm better at JS than .NET by far. I really dig hosts like Netlify. That
said, if I need to spin up a MVP for a project, it's faster, better quality &
easier with VS, Azure & .NET for me at least. Startups really underestimate
this one I think.

From what I've heard, it's also a great platform with Xamarin for mobile, with
Unity for Games, etc. Add on the experimental work going on with compiling to
Web Assembly & the .NET framework has a great chance to be running anywhere &
everywhere.

~~~
reitanqild
> If you've never used Visual Studio's Full IDE or ... you're missing out on
> some huge productivity gains.

I've yet to see anything standard Visual Studio does better than Netbeans or
JetBrains tools (besides language specific things) but I am yet again willing
to be enlightened if someone can explain it to me.

Background: I have months of experience with Visual Studio (more if you count
back to school), months on IntelliJ and years on eclipse and Netbeans.

~~~
beagle3
Visual Studio / C++ 6.0 (from 1998!) was by far the best C++ environment at
least until 2013 came out (The last version I used was VS2012) - You never had
to wait for it even in 2000, when I first used it, and definitely not later.

VS2005 (or 2008? can't remember), which I had to switch to because for x64
work, was unbearably slow and unresponsive in comparison -- although the
general standards of responsiveness have come down, so today it might not be
so bad (see, e.g., Atom, VSCode, everything JetBrains compared to old-guard
Sublime)

From my only-slightly-nostalgia-tinted experience, I would correct GP's post
to say "If you've never used VC++6 full ide" ...

~~~
mattferderer
I didn't want to comment on the others because it's been years since I've used
Eclipse or JetBrain's IDEs. They were sluggish back in the day but so was
Visual Studio. They made me jump to Sublime.

The latest release of Visual Studio has performed very well for me as long as
I avoid ReSharper (somewhat ironic). Fortunately they've included a lot of
those features in the professional & enterprise versions.

------
mikekij
My company sells dev tools to software companies. Whenever I have talked to a
startup about their tech stack and they reveal they’re on .NET, I later find
out that none of the founders are technical, and they’ve outsourced
development to Eastern Europe or India.

This is not to say that a startup founded by technical people couldn’t be
successful using .NET; I just haven’t seen it.

~~~
abakker
Is that...bad? I mean, the point of a startup is to start a business, not to
write code, isn’t it?

I’d bet that there are many startups that don’t need technical founders, and
many who have them are building technology that isn’t really differentiated.
One thing that is important is obviously fine-grained control over the
business, so I could see how outsourcing might make that slightly harder to
manage.

~~~
reustle
Not only fine-grained control, but as they grow they need to consider the cost
of growing and maintaining a system built with antiquated tech.

~~~
_up
Do you mean with antiquated? That the APIs aren't changing on a weekly basis
and you can concentrate on developing instead of updating your code?

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snarfy
.NET is fine. Visual Studio is the de-facto IDE.

Microsoft's problem has always been Windows. Software made for "A PC on every
desk" doesn't fit so well into a wall of servers running the internet. They
should have gave away Windows Server for free. Heck they should do it now. It
should be as free as .net core.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Why would they give away a product that creates a substantial part of their
revenue?

~~~
snarfy
Why install an Exchange server when I can use Office 365? Even Microsoft is
cannibalizing their server offerings. Everybody is moving that stuff off prem.
Windows server licensing doesn't make sense off prem.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_Everybody is moving that stuff off prem._

Even if that does happen we are nowhere near it yet, there are a lot of
servers out in corporate offices and will be for the foreseeable future. If
this wasn't the case then Microsoft wouldn't be releasing new versions of
Windows Server.

~~~
snarfy
I agree we aren't there yet, but I could see maybe a new sku? Windows Cloud
Server or something similar. Windows Nano Server supposedly fits this bill,
but businesses are going to want the real deal, not the stripped down nano
version.

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plaguuuuuu
.NET is demonstrably a great environment (judging by effectiveness) and
licensing is hardly an issue since .NET core. So it must be partly cultural.
First of all, unless you have macbooks, you're not really a startup. and if
you're a new developer who needs to pad out the CV, naturally you will be
attracted to the most buzzwordy tech stack available - if it isn't dockerised
scala->graphql->redis->whatever so you can code while you code, nobody's gonna
hire you afterwards man.

Also that awkward, sad reaction when you reveal to other burgeoning developers
that you work in .NET

------
scarface74
In 2008, I looked at where the market was going and decided to tie my horse to
Microsoft, .Net and enterprise development. It’s been a good ride, but it’s
clear that JS is eating the world. I’m slowly moving over more toward JS and
Linux. I am taking a brief detour to Python and AWS though.

I’m not touching Ruby. There are jobs for it but they don’t pay well.

~~~
finaliteration
> I’m not touching Ruby though. There are jobs for it but they don’t pay well.

Source? I know I’m an N of 1, but I just got hired to work on a Rails app and
the pay and other benefits are pretty competitive...

~~~
toomanybeersies
To add to your sample set, I'm a rails developer and also get paid handsomely.
My salary is higher than it would be for a C# or Java dev of the same
experience. There's a shortage of rails developers in my area I think, but
plenty of C# and Java devs.

~~~
finaliteration
I think that Ruby has lost its “cool“ factor whereas .NET is back on the rise
due to the release of .NET Core and TypeScript, so a lot of people have moved
away from Ruby which leaves those of us who still have an interest in it to
fill in the gaps.

It also seems like every year we hear that “Rails is dying”, but I don’t think
I’ve seen those claims materialize. It’s maybe not as popular as it was 5
years ago, but I’m not hearing any death knells.

~~~
scarface74
Not saying anything about Ruby in particular but you never want to skate away
from the puck unless you’re near retirement and want to make some quick bucks
- like people still writing COBOL.

------
m23khan
I am sure if the website included majority of fortune 500 companies, then .NET
usage would reflect favorably (it still won't overtake java but it would be up
there).

There is a place for technologies and associated stacks where the demand
exists. The whole .NET and Microsoft ecosystem is super useful for large
enterprises who have plethora of data and somehow need to accommodate
employees who are both IT and non IT (think of typical IT Business Analysts
and scrum masters and product owners -- they are usually involved with
microsoft-based tools as I find it).

------
illuminati1911
When people say "Oh but now Visual Studio is free for small scale use, .NET
core is officially supported on linux" etc. I really just have to ask one
question:

So what?

This whole conversation somehow reminds me of the old iPhone vs Android
conversations about 5-6 years ago when Android phones started catching up on
iPhone in features such as non-lagginess etc. and people were like "So now
Android has it too and you have no more excuses not to change to Android now!"

Well...hahah...it doesn't really work that way. Even if Android could do
everything that iPhone could...why would I still change? Why would I see all
that trouble just to gain _NOTHING_. It's same with MS tech stack. Why would I
change from tools I know and trust to MS stack when it would take time and
money, but I wouldn't get anything?

In addition MS has been fucking over people for about two decades and just
because they have been seemingly friendly for last few years why would I trust
them?

Also if one were a software engineer, more or less experienced, and was
thinking what tools to use, what do you think? Would he pick the tools used by
top engineers and tech companies or embarrasing enterprise tools designed for
senile bankers and municipality sinecures who are afraid of tech and want to
use tools made by big company they have been repeatedly told since 1980s?

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joeax
I don't think the MS stack is going anywhere. It's true that startups tend to
avoid MS due to the (real or perceived) high upfront costs and its general
lowness on the hipster curve, but once you look outside of SF/Bay Area it
normalizes out, and you'll find plenty of .NET/C# jobs at tech/software
companies in whatever city.

~~~
guu
Now that .NET Core exists, it is possible to develop on the .NET stack without
licensing fees (By hosting on Linux and using an open source database) or
using a third party implementation (Mono).

It remains to be seen whether this will help it gain traction with more
companies or not though.

~~~
paulie_a
Yeah but why bother? Unless you have some legacy code and are forced to use c#
I wouldn't waste my time anything Microsoft.

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CyanLite2
There's an overwhelming majority of developers who recently majored in CompSci
or went to Bootcamps that have never touched a Microsoft development
ecosystem, let alone Windows before. Schools/Camps are mostly teaching Python,
JavaScript, or Java although that's starting to change now with .NET Core
being open-source and cross platform and being one of the fastest frameworks
out there on TechEmPower Benchmarks.

I founded a startup on the Microsoft tech stack (.NET Core, VSTS, and Azure).
Why? It's an incredibly productive dev/tooling environment that
Java/Python/AWS doesn't even come close to. The downside? It's really hard to
find good C# talent that isn't stuck in an enterprise development mindset.

~~~
vile
The flipside is also true; as a C# / MS stack focused developer myself, it's
quite difficult to find satisfying work that isn't enterprisey, and it seems
to be mostly because Microsoft isn't Cool.

~~~
scarface74
The only thing "cool about a company is that they deposit money into my
account every two weeks. I don't look for "cool" jobs.

~~~
angry_octet
Do you like your work boring?

~~~
scarface74
After developing professionally for over 20 years and as a hobbyist for 10
years before that, there is nothing "exciting" about software development. I
don't hate my job or my career by any means, but at the end of the day, it
just funds my lifestyle.

~~~
angry_octet
That's fine, but plenty of us choose to work on systems we find intrinsically
interesting and/or on problems we consider important. Sometimes that comes
with a financial penalty. Personally, I'm happy to get slightly less money in
exchange for more interesting and meaningful work.

------
underwater
Microsoft is doing their darnedest to own JavaScript as a language. TypeScript
+ VSCode is making inroads.

------
peteforde
It's weird that the author would include Shopify in a list of companies that
don't create their own tools.

Shopify is one of the most prolific technology creators in the tech community.
Their CEO was on the original core Rails team and is directly responsible for
several common libraries and concepts that have been picked up by other tools.

~~~
pard68
Netflix too. Fairly certain they develop a fair amount of their own stuff in
house.

------
marktolson
I've been developing with .NET since 1.1. The initial appeal of ASP.NET
WebForms was due to the fact that you could build software similarly to the
way you build Windows desktop based apps. State was managed in an unmanaged
environment. You didn't have to worry about varying browser capabilities /
quirks due to the lack of standardisation at the time.

Fast forward a few years and all of a sudden you have browser standards and
amazing MVVM frameworks. Everything you needed ASP.NET for was no longer
required.

I still work on enterprise .NET systems and it's no surprise as to why
startups look to alternatives. Sure the tooling is amazing but so are many of
the other tools out there. After using simple web frameworks like AdonisJS I
see no real reason for building your service layer (let alone your app layer)
in .NET.

------
Xorlev
I'm not sure why the author is surprised about Ruby. Rails was the darling of
startups for years and is probably still a common choice of backend.

This data is also rife with bias: stackshare isn't representative of startups
let alone companies in general.

~~~
pard68
Also, Ruby has Jekyll which is probably close behind Wordpress (php) in terms
of usage by blog/ecommerce.

------
AtlasBarfed
More damning to me is that the stack components in a couple examples that
aren't languages, such as databases (MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, Cassandra,
Elasticsearch, etc), cache fabrics (Redis, memcached), tooling (Chef, Puppet,
etc), data pipelines (Hadoop, ELK, etc)...

None of it is written in .NET except for interface drivers. Java, the butt of
all jokes, is responsible for a number of the key stack components, and C++
might not be a lingua franca of the startups, but foundational components are
written in it.

Can someone name a major OSS project/tool/database/etc that is written in C#?

------
kylec
I think a lot of it is that there just aren't as many developers that know it
compared to the other tech stacks.

Part of the reason for that is that if you're starting out as a web developer
trying to build stuff for fun, you're probably not picking .NET as your tech
stack when there are options that are freer (both as in beer and in speech),
easier/cheaper to deploy, and have a more active online community that can
help you if you get stuck.

And ultimately, if you're a company that is picking a tech stack, you
ultimately need to hire people to work with that stack, and it's a lot easier
to find people that know Node/PHP/React/whatever than it is to find people
that know .NET.

------
RickJWagner
.Net Core is fully supported on Red Hat Linux.

If it gains serious traction, that could change the development landscape for
a fair chunk of Enterprise development.

------
cmmartin
Why are Javascript and Node.js different here? Especially considering this is
back-end only. Who is using Javascript on the server without Node.js and how?
I think they should probably be combined and if so, you would see absolute
dominance by Node.js

------
h4b4n3r0
C++ is alive and well at all those companies, yet the bar chart shows zero.
This immediately makes the rest of this “data” suspect.

~~~
saagarjha
You were downvoted pretty quickly, but I agree with what you're saying: I
don't trust this data. Out of curiousity, I searched up Apple. Of course I got
Xcode, Swift, and Cocoa…but not much else. No mention of the hundreds of
technologies Apple uses to keep its services (Maps, Siri, iCloud) running, no
mention of even _Objective-C_ , which probably outnumbers lines of Swift code
ten to one. It seems like this website is just a collection of public
perception about companies' tech stacks rather than being an accurate source.

~~~
rovr138
Not sure if you need to work at a company before you can submit the data, but
it also seems like this scans the website and GitHub repos you give it to
identify the stacks.

This seems like a bad source. Specially if anyone can submit a company they
don’t work for and only use the url scan feature.

------
arc2
As a Microsoft and all the closed-source software hater, I feel reassured

~~~
Rjevski
I understand the hate on Microsoft given the recent abominations they produce
(Windows 10, "improved" version of Skype, etc) but why the hate on closed-
source software in general? People need to eat too.

