ASP.NET isn't the worst technology to use for a startup. There's lots of useful prebuilt components for it (commercial usually, but the value is still there).

ASP.NET isn't the worst technology to use for a startup. There's lots of useful prebuilt components for it (commercial usually, but the value is still there). Microsoft is also offering some pretty good hosting platforms for startups, and usually you can pick up licenses for low cost. EC2 now is also offering Windows instances for easy cloud hosting. That said, I've done ASP.NET professionally for about 5 years, and 2 years ago switched to Ruby / Rails / Merb and have found the transition to be a huge improvement. The open source world has a better atmosphere, and I believe better talent overall. The worst thing about ASP.NET is the corporate culture, where unskilled VB coders adopt it, and use it to build really badly developed websites. Also, ASP.NET pretty much requires Windows. Trying to develop it on Mono, or on a Mac (with Vmware) is an effort in futility. If you go ASP.NET, make sure you're comfortable with Windows. This was one issue that I had a major problem with. Command line scripting and build tools in Windows are generally aweful. This will limit any good developer's productivity.