>>maybe they should release some more of their ecosystem to make it viable for more startups to use .NET. Someone small using some free compilers/libraries and

>>maybe they should release some more of their ecosystem to make it viable for more startups to use .NET. Someone small using some free compilers/libraries and MySQL may eventually be a prospect to buy VS and SQL Server And there's the thing right there - I don't think Microsoft really cares much about startups - after all, the success rate is fairly low for startups and it probably doesn't seem worth it to them to "invest" in businesses that are, more often than not, going to fail. Putting their marketing budget behind large corporations and governments is far more lucrative for them.