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Great, another .NET is dying post voted up on HN. Didn't we have one of those just this morning? Meanwhile, in the real world, Microsoft posted these earnings:

Great, another .NET is dying post voted up on HN. Didn't we have one of those just this morning? Meanwhile, in the real world, Microsoft posted these earnings: "Server & Tools business reported $5.04 billion of revenue, up 11% from last year" Inspite of competing products like Linux, Apache, Eclipse, Ruby, Java being given away for free, people are willing to pay for Windows Server, Visual Studio and IIS. Does anyone have real data related to ".NET is dying" other than idle conjecture, short sighted "frog in the well" anectodes which sound like they're written and voted up by people sipping on a latte on a Macbook in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley? Like the number of jobs posted? They seem to increasing every day. Sigh, some people here just love these '.NET is dying' posts, perhaps some with a vested interest to scare startups from using it. Again, any hard data will be appreciated that shows .NET is dying instead of the same paragraph upon paragraph of opinion and no links, references or data, we have enough HN comments of that already.

eduardordm 13y ago
You couldn't buy the VS licenses + SQL Server + Windows Server with the money YCombinator provides you. So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup.
- cooldeal 13y ago
  You don't need to buy them: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx Prime example: Stackoverflow/StackExchange is built on the Microsoft stack.
  - eduardordm 13y ago
    BizSpark has rules many startups cannot follow and is only valid for 3 years. This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers.
    - harryh 13y ago
      If your startup is around 3 years in the cost of paying for the tools won't matter.
    - CloudNine 13y ago
      There's a LOT of startups here http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Partners/Startups.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Partners/Startups.aspx >This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers. Would you hold Google to the same standard and say that's true of their free Google Apps for education and how they use free email to sign you into Google.com so they can track you across different PCs? http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/ http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/
      - randomfool 13y ago
        Do you happen to work for Microsoft? If not, cool. But if so, would be good to be clear. You've suddenly become very active with what I'd consider an overly Microsoft approach (looking at your comments from the past few hours). (ex 'softie here).
    - cmircea 13y ago
      "BizSpark has rules many startups cannot follow" Please explain. The rules seem pretty simple to me and certainly something every company can follow: - Privately held. - Less than 3 years old. - Earning less than $1 million per year. - Developing software. After 3 years you can afford to purchase extra licenses (you get to keep the BizSpark ones). If not, your business sucks. Disclaimer: BizSpark member.
  - cookiecaper 13y ago
    Not sure if that is a prime example, since StackOverflow was built with the wealthy businessman Joel Spolsky as a primary backer. That doesn't diminish anything they accomplished, it just means that they didn't do it without access to sufficient resources.
    - kmontrose 13y ago
      At Stack Overflow we ran on Bizpark til sometime in 2012, it really is a very nice program (everyone seems to forget that you keep the licenses you get, it's not like you have to re-buy everything when you graduate). While I suppose in theory Joel could have thrown a lot of money away just because it didn't happen that way. Stack Overflow was running on it's own income until the first round of funding ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-a/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-... ), excepting the pre-launch period (everyone might have just taken equity then, I don't know I wasn't around until just before the series A). I think it was mostly ad income, though Careers ( http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ ) was around fairly early too. Disclaimer: Stack Exchange employee
      - cookiecaper 13y ago
        No matter how disciplined Spolsky was with the funds, nothing's ever the same if you know that you have the option to just inject a bunch of money into one of your projects should the need arise (and of course, SO had another non-cash leg up: the blogs of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky as major marketing avenues, i.e., the instant attention of large swaths of the developer workforce). If you don't have that option, regardless of if it's used or not, you play by different rules. Stack Exchange is cool and everything, but it didn't have the same difficulties that face most bootstrapped startups.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Silhouette 13y ago
  Somehow I doubt anyone really joins a programme like YC's for the money. In any case, if you want to work with the best tools, sometimes you have to pay a premium to get them. That's either damaging to people who can't/won't pay the money or it's an advantage for those with enough confidence in what they're doing to make the investment, depending on which side of the line you're on.
- rayiner 13y ago
  That just means yc gives too little money.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Two things: (a) The money YC is giving isn't intended to solve capex problems like this. It's meant to make the first couple months of getting a minimal offering viable for small early teams. In the YC model, if the problem your business solves involves significant capex costs, you use YC to match your company with a next round of investors to handle that problem. (b) The reality is that you do get enough money to fund a .NET stack when you get into YC, because YC comes with an assurance of immediate follow-on convertible note investment. Neither of these two points makes .NET a better choice for early-stage startups than Rails or Django or PHP; Microsoft has to smooth over the expense problem with programs like Bizspark.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  You can say the same of any commercial vendor. How you would do a startup in a world without BSD and Linux, just with commercial vendors? There are more out there than just Apple and Microsoft.
- orangethirty 13y ago
  So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup. Not every startup has to work with the small amount YC hands out. I know of a fair amount of startups using an MS stack, and they are doing very well. Of course, they are not SV cool, but they are making good money. You should sit back and analyze what you just said, because it is a pretty strange point to make.
  - eduardordm 13y ago
    My current company uses extensively .NET and I have almost a decade of experience working with it at my last employer, where I was also responsible for choosing and buying such products. In my last employer (government), we didn't choose .NET, microsoft won the contracts. In the last update when I still worked there, we spent 250k USD to update our programmers VS to 2010 + windows 7. (I wonder if they will now update again). SQL Server prices are similar to oracle's with similar features. In my startup (not a startup anymore) I had to spend 40k just to get the environment needed for a project (involving telephony) the only reason we had to use .NET was because the hardware manufacturer only provided driver+tooling for windows and some components were exclusively for .NET. Because we mostly use linux and macs, we also had to buy windows licenses. In my country, a Windows 8 license cost almost 2x the minimum wage. We happened to have a discussion if we should give up or not a specific product because of the microsoft taxation on our business. The only reason we decided to keep using .NET is the cheap labor and the lack of hardware suppliers willing to provide us drivers and tools for linux. So yes, microsoft damages not only startups, but companies in general.
    - orangethirty 13y ago
      Would you say that Oracle, and IBM also damage companies?
      - eduardordm 13y ago
        I don't know much about IBM products but I'm a heavy Oracle DB user in the process of migrating to Postgres due to simple problems, cost not being one of them. In fact, you will see a lot of users still using very old Oracle versions and getting full support from oracle. Oracle (DB product) is the wrong choice for most startups, I actually wrote a post about that some time ago: http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/1/this-is-why-you-should-never-use-oracle-db http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/1/this-is-why-y...
ilaksh 13y ago
Quite a few people are locked into that toolchain and don't have a choice but to continue buying what Microsoft is selling. And I think that is one of the main reasons that many .NET developers who are a little bit familiar with open source and non-Microsoft technologies are starting to wonder if its worthwhile paying all of that money to have Microsoft make all of those architectural decisions for them. Just start with the name, ".NET". What were they referencing there? The network. The web. Especially if you interpret that to mean the web, which I think it really is referring to, you have to ask yourself, is Microsoft or ANY one particular company really leading the way on the web? I think the answer is no. The leaders may be employed by some particular companies like Google, but they are mainly organizing projects on their own through things like github. They chose that name for a reason. They knew if they wanted to stay relevant, they needed to focus on the web. Does web development need Microsoft? Ask the average web developer. Personally, I don't think I can ever forgive them for what they have done (and continue to do) to Internet Explorer. Does Microsoft need web development? Actually they are opposing forces when it comes right down to it. Microsoft makes too many billions of dollars through Windows-related products to really push the web platform forward. So they have actively been working to impede it by pushing out incompatible and underpowered browsers. Can Microsoft's traditional licensing revenue streams survive a real conversion to open-source? LOL.
- jussij 13y ago
  > Quite a few people are locked into that toolchain and don't have a choice but to continue buying what Microsoft is selling. I don't buy that for a minute. The Windows Server division is one of the fastest growing divisions inside of Microsoft. From their last Q3FY13 report revenue from server and tools grew 11% driven by SQL server and Windows Server growth. Based on those figures business is scrambling to buy into the Microsoft toolchain, not trying to leave.
  - cookiecaper 13y ago
    I don't know if that's a valid extrapolation. I, for one, in all my working years have never met a Linux company that was interested in switching to .NET, but I met many that wanted it the other way around if they could only justify the upfront investment to convert the proprietary application stack. With cross-platform compatibility, specifically mobile compatibility [on platforms people actually use, i.e., not Windows Phone], being a major sticking point, .NET is becoming less and less desirable on the surface level. Microsoft is just like Oracle. Big fancy businessmen who know nothing about development automatically buy into the MS stack just because it's a big name and the labor is easy to retain. Hardly any technical considerations go into it, and then they're upset when they [eventually] learn that the end result won't work with the iPad. What about the alternate explanation that Windows Server is growing because demand for the products that already use Microsoft's stack is growing, despite the stack itself? What about the explanation that people are buying more server licenses than they used to due to increasingly widespread virtualization deployments? Whereas people used to buy relative big metal and run one OS on it, now people are taking that hardware and deploying many small VMs across it, each requiring its own license? There are plenty of interpretations of that data that aren't "people are flocking to .NET".
pjmlp 13y ago
Because HN readers are too young to remember the days without open source, where you needed to pay for the tooling, and think Microsoft is the only commercial vendor of developer tools.
coldtea 13y ago
>"Server & Tools business reported $5.04 billion of revenue, up 11% from last year" So, they made in a year something around what Apple makes every quarter just from iPad sales? That's the rosy sign MS's "Servers and Tools" business is doing OK?
- recoiledsnake 13y ago
  >So, they made in a year something around what Apple makes every quarter just from iPad sales? That's the rosy sign MS's "Servers and Tools" business is doing OK? That's their server and tools revenue in a quarter, not a year. In your rush to compare it with an irrelevant and totally unrelated figure you've taken leave of facts and reality. Why not compare the yearly figure now with how much Exxon makes by selling gas and then conclude the Server and Tools division is not doing okay? I mean that's what you want to conclude right?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >That's their server and tools revenue in a quarter, not a year. In your rush to compare it with an irrelevant and totally unrelated figure you've taken leave of facts and reality. Haven't taken out any facts -- the parent poster (you?) didn't add it was a quarter result in the first place. And the "X% up from last year" didn't help. That said, it's totally unrelated only in that the end product sold is different. People still compare companies based on their revenue all the time -- including totally different beasts such as IBM and MS, or, indeed, Exxon and Apple. If you want to measure relative strength it's quite insightful. >Why not compare the yearly figure now with how much Exxon makes by selling gas and then conclude the Server and Tools division is not doing okay? I mean that's what you want to conclude right? No, I want to conclude that MS, and their enterprise sales specifically, which was once the huge behemoth of the computing industry, makes a not that impressive revenue compared to other players. It might even be their best revenue ever. It still is worse compared to what they made vs what other companies made a decade or so ago. In other words, the point I tried to make, maybe unsuccessfully, is that they might be billionaires, and they even might more than ever, but whereas once they used to own the town, now there are several other billionaires around, including some multi-billionaires.

eduardordm 13y ago

You couldn't buy the VS licenses + SQL Server + Windows Server with the money YCombinator provides you. So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup.

cooldeal 13y ago
You don't need to buy them: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx Prime example: Stackoverflow/StackExchange is built on the Microsoft stack.
- eduardordm 13y ago
  BizSpark has rules many startups cannot follow and is only valid for 3 years. This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers.
  - harryh 13y ago
    If your startup is around 3 years in the cost of paying for the tools won't matter.
  - CloudNine 13y ago
    There's a LOT of startups here http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Partners/Startups.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Partners/Startups.aspx >This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers. Would you hold Google to the same standard and say that's true of their free Google Apps for education and how they use free email to sign you into Google.com so they can track you across different PCs? http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/ http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/
    - randomfool 13y ago
      Do you happen to work for Microsoft? If not, cool. But if so, would be good to be clear. You've suddenly become very active with what I'd consider an overly Microsoft approach (looking at your comments from the past few hours). (ex 'softie here).
  - cmircea 13y ago
    "BizSpark has rules many startups cannot follow" Please explain. The rules seem pretty simple to me and certainly something every company can follow: - Privately held. - Less than 3 years old. - Earning less than $1 million per year. - Developing software. After 3 years you can afford to purchase extra licenses (you get to keep the BizSpark ones). If not, your business sucks. Disclaimer: BizSpark member.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  Not sure if that is a prime example, since StackOverflow was built with the wealthy businessman Joel Spolsky as a primary backer. That doesn't diminish anything they accomplished, it just means that they didn't do it without access to sufficient resources.
  - kmontrose 13y ago
    At Stack Overflow we ran on Bizpark til sometime in 2012, it really is a very nice program (everyone seems to forget that you keep the licenses you get, it's not like you have to re-buy everything when you graduate). While I suppose in theory Joel could have thrown a lot of money away just because it didn't happen that way. Stack Overflow was running on it's own income until the first round of funding ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-a/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-... ), excepting the pre-launch period (everyone might have just taken equity then, I don't know I wasn't around until just before the series A). I think it was mostly ad income, though Careers ( http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ ) was around fairly early too. Disclaimer: Stack Exchange employee
    - cookiecaper 13y ago
      No matter how disciplined Spolsky was with the funds, nothing's ever the same if you know that you have the option to just inject a bunch of money into one of your projects should the need arise (and of course, SO had another non-cash leg up: the blogs of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky as major marketing avenues, i.e., the instant attention of large swaths of the developer workforce). If you don't have that option, regardless of if it's used or not, you play by different rules. Stack Exchange is cool and everything, but it didn't have the same difficulties that face most bootstrapped startups.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Silhouette 13y ago
Somehow I doubt anyone really joins a programme like YC's for the money. In any case, if you want to work with the best tools, sometimes you have to pay a premium to get them. That's either damaging to people who can't/won't pay the money or it's an advantage for those with enough confidence in what they're doing to make the investment, depending on which side of the line you're on.
rayiner 13y ago
That just means yc gives too little money.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Two things: (a) The money YC is giving isn't intended to solve capex problems like this. It's meant to make the first couple months of getting a minimal offering viable for small early teams. In the YC model, if the problem your business solves involves significant capex costs, you use YC to match your company with a next round of investors to handle that problem. (b) The reality is that you do get enough money to fund a .NET stack when you get into YC, because YC comes with an assurance of immediate follow-on convertible note investment. Neither of these two points makes .NET a better choice for early-stage startups than Rails or Django or PHP; Microsoft has to smooth over the expense problem with programs like Bizspark.
pjmlp 13y ago
You can say the same of any commercial vendor. How you would do a startup in a world without BSD and Linux, just with commercial vendors? There are more out there than just Apple and Microsoft.
orangethirty 13y ago
So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup. Not every startup has to work with the small amount YC hands out. I know of a fair amount of startups using an MS stack, and they are doing very well. Of course, they are not SV cool, but they are making good money. You should sit back and analyze what you just said, because it is a pretty strange point to make.
- eduardordm 13y ago
  My current company uses extensively .NET and I have almost a decade of experience working with it at my last employer, where I was also responsible for choosing and buying such products. In my last employer (government), we didn't choose .NET, microsoft won the contracts. In the last update when I still worked there, we spent 250k USD to update our programmers VS to 2010 + windows 7. (I wonder if they will now update again). SQL Server prices are similar to oracle's with similar features. In my startup (not a startup anymore) I had to spend 40k just to get the environment needed for a project (involving telephony) the only reason we had to use .NET was because the hardware manufacturer only provided driver+tooling for windows and some components were exclusively for .NET. Because we mostly use linux and macs, we also had to buy windows licenses. In my country, a Windows 8 license cost almost 2x the minimum wage. We happened to have a discussion if we should give up or not a specific product because of the microsoft taxation on our business. The only reason we decided to keep using .NET is the cheap labor and the lack of hardware suppliers willing to provide us drivers and tools for linux. So yes, microsoft damages not only startups, but companies in general.
  - orangethirty 13y ago
    Would you say that Oracle, and IBM also damage companies?
    - eduardordm 13y ago
      I don't know much about IBM products but I'm a heavy Oracle DB user in the process of migrating to Postgres due to simple problems, cost not being one of them. In fact, you will see a lot of users still using very old Oracle versions and getting full support from oracle. Oracle (DB product) is the wrong choice for most startups, I actually wrote a post about that some time ago: http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/1/this-is-why-you-should-never-use-oracle-db http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/1/this-is-why-y...

ilaksh 13y ago

Quite a few people are locked into that toolchain and don't have a choice but to continue buying what Microsoft is selling. And I think that is one of the main reasons that many .NET developers who are a little bit familiar with open source and non-Microsoft technologies are starting to wonder if its worthwhile paying all of that money to have Microsoft make all of those architectural decisions for them. Just start with the name, ".NET". What were they referencing there? The network. The web. Especially if you interpret that to mean the web, which I think it really is referring to, you have to ask yourself, is Microsoft or ANY one particular company really leading the way on the web? I think the answer is no. The leaders may be employed by some particular companies like Google, but they are mainly organizing projects on their own through things like github. They chose that name for a reason. They knew if they wanted to stay relevant, they needed to focus on the web. Does web development need Microsoft? Ask the average web developer. Personally, I don't think I can ever forgive them for what they have done (and continue to do) to Internet Explorer. Does Microsoft need web development? Actually they are opposing forces when it comes right down to it. Microsoft makes too many billions of dollars through Windows-related products to really push the web platform forward. So they have actively been working to impede it by pushing out incompatible and underpowered browsers. Can Microsoft's traditional licensing revenue streams survive a real conversion to open-source? LOL.

jussij 13y ago
> Quite a few people are locked into that toolchain and don't have a choice but to continue buying what Microsoft is selling. I don't buy that for a minute. The Windows Server division is one of the fastest growing divisions inside of Microsoft. From their last Q3FY13 report revenue from server and tools grew 11% driven by SQL server and Windows Server growth. Based on those figures business is scrambling to buy into the Microsoft toolchain, not trying to leave.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  I don't know if that's a valid extrapolation. I, for one, in all my working years have never met a Linux company that was interested in switching to .NET, but I met many that wanted it the other way around if they could only justify the upfront investment to convert the proprietary application stack. With cross-platform compatibility, specifically mobile compatibility [on platforms people actually use, i.e., not Windows Phone], being a major sticking point, .NET is becoming less and less desirable on the surface level. Microsoft is just like Oracle. Big fancy businessmen who know nothing about development automatically buy into the MS stack just because it's a big name and the labor is easy to retain. Hardly any technical considerations go into it, and then they're upset when they [eventually] learn that the end result won't work with the iPad. What about the alternate explanation that Windows Server is growing because demand for the products that already use Microsoft's stack is growing, despite the stack itself? What about the explanation that people are buying more server licenses than they used to due to increasingly widespread virtualization deployments? Whereas people used to buy relative big metal and run one OS on it, now people are taking that hardware and deploying many small VMs across it, each requiring its own license? There are plenty of interpretations of that data that aren't "people are flocking to .NET".

pjmlp 13y ago

Because HN readers are too young to remember the days without open source, where you needed to pay for the tooling, and think Microsoft is the only commercial vendor of developer tools.

coldtea 13y ago

>"Server & Tools business reported $5.04 billion of revenue, up 11% from last year" So, they made in a year something around what Apple makes every quarter just from iPad sales? That's the rosy sign MS's "Servers and Tools" business is doing OK?

recoiledsnake 13y ago
>So, they made in a year something around what Apple makes every quarter just from iPad sales? That's the rosy sign MS's "Servers and Tools" business is doing OK? That's their server and tools revenue in a quarter, not a year. In your rush to compare it with an irrelevant and totally unrelated figure you've taken leave of facts and reality. Why not compare the yearly figure now with how much Exxon makes by selling gas and then conclude the Server and Tools division is not doing okay? I mean that's what you want to conclude right?
- coldtea 13y ago
  >That's their server and tools revenue in a quarter, not a year. In your rush to compare it with an irrelevant and totally unrelated figure you've taken leave of facts and reality. Haven't taken out any facts -- the parent poster (you?) didn't add it was a quarter result in the first place. And the "X% up from last year" didn't help. That said, it's totally unrelated only in that the end product sold is different. People still compare companies based on their revenue all the time -- including totally different beasts such as IBM and MS, or, indeed, Exxon and Apple. If you want to measure relative strength it's quite insightful. >Why not compare the yearly figure now with how much Exxon makes by selling gas and then conclude the Server and Tools division is not doing okay? I mean that's what you want to conclude right? No, I want to conclude that MS, and their enterprise sales specifically, which was once the huge behemoth of the computing industry, makes a not that impressive revenue compared to other players. It might even be their best revenue ever. It still is worse compared to what they made vs what other companies made a decade or so ago. In other words, the point I tried to make, maybe unsuccessfully, is that they might be billionaires, and they even might more than ever, but whereas once they used to own the town, now there are several other billionaires around, including some multi-billionaires.