> Not much of an issue with programs such as BizSpark. You have 3 years to 'grow' and afterwards you have to fork over a couple thousand bucks, depending on wha

> Not much of an issue with programs such as BizSpark. You have 3 years to 'grow' and afterwards you have to fork over a couple thousand bucks, depending on what you use. Are you sure? Facebook and Google both had thousands of servers when they were three year old (they are in the millions now), and facebook already had sizable databases that would have cost a small fortune had they been MSSQL (or Oracle or DB2 for that matter). I was under the possibly mistaken impression the BizSpark covers your devtools, not your deployment. And the costs are just the most easily quantifiable advantage - Google, Facebook and Whatsup have all modified their stack (Linux Kernel, MySQL, Erlang VM) in ways that are simply not available with the Microsoft stack. Granted, not every business is Google or Facebook - but anyone who dreams big enough sees Microsoft's stack does not make sense .... and even when you are thinking small, there are really few reasons to rely in Microsoft except at the edges.