Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

http://www.piehead.com/blog/2011/05/why-startups-could-use-net-but-don%E2%80%99t

by ghurlman • 15 years ago

63 99 15 years ago

piehead.com

juddlyon• 15 years ago

"The real reason startups don’t use .NET is based more on culture than technology."

Ding ding ding, we have a winner. It's more about which tribe you want to belong to than anything these days.

bmelton• 15 years ago

I've written code in a lot of languages and on a lot of platforms.

I ultimately switched to Python not because I wanted to be part of the cabal of Pythonistas (which I frankly believe is much less 'cool' than Ruby), but because it has exceptional platform coverage, is highly readable - solving a problem I've had working with teams or with old code, and is easy to get up to speed in. Mainly though, it allows me to run my code in the cheapest way possible, and scale for pennies on the dollar compared to .Net.

I love Visual Studio, and I'm more than happy to write .Net code (though I haven't done it in awhile,) but I won't for my personal projects because the resulting product is prohibitively more expensive to run and operate than one built in a variety of other languages.

dasil003• 15 years ago

Yes, but how do you decide which tribe to join initially?

This argument bothers me because it implies that somehow people are not being objective. Well, the truth is you'll never get anything done unless you form opinions and move forward, but that doesn't mean they don't have good reasons besides peer influence.

Personally I have never programmed on a Microsoft stack because I don't want to be hostage to the whims and resource allocation of one company. With open source frameworks I know that the project quality is a goal unto itself, whereas a Microsoft project lives or dies by its ability to contribute to their larger strategy. With open source the worst case scenario is that the community dies and I have to fix problems myself. Unless there's a compelling reason to go with a proprietary stack (eg. access to the iOS App Store or Windows) then I'll go open source every time, and not just because my friends do.

generalk• 15 years ago

I think there are plenty of valid reasons to avoid MS technology that don't boil down to "because I want to be like these guys."

If you base your infrastructure around Microsoft technology, you're essentially stuck in MSland. Of course, since you're using .NET, you must also have Windows servers and IIS. If you need persistent storage, MS says to use MS SQL Server. You could use other things, but then you're going outside the lines.

OTOH, if you build using free tools, you can change as needs demand. Apache httpd suddenly a little too heavyweight for your needs? Switch to nginx! MySQL working okay but you need geospatial queries, for instance? Migrate to PostgreSQL.

Or how about the ability to run Redis natively, or access to a POSIX environment that literally every other major operating system supports?

If technology isn't playing a role in your technology decisions, you're doing it wrong.

aespinoza3• 15 years ago

The culture is so important lately, that it is not only .Net Framework that is getting neglected, also Java. It seems start-ups feel that working with Ruby, Python or PHP is the best way to go for every problem.

But I do believe is cultural. We are building a start-up with several pieces of the service in .Net. And it has been extremely fast for us development wise. We are a team of multidisciplinary developers, and we decided to go with .Net for so many reasons; one of them was speed of development and speed of execution. And it has been great so far.

The weird thing is that we are considering using other technologies for specific problems, like C low level execution, but Ruby hasn't yet been found needed; at least not yet.

We believe that as a developer solving a problem we must choose the best tool for the job, and we believe culturally that is what should be promoted. Ruby, Python, PHP, Asp.Net, C#, Java, C++, Lisp, etc. They are only tools to achieve a goal.

Startups should strive to be problem solvers, not technology evangelists.

sudont• 15 years ago

Cultural, depending on your desktop platform. .NET doesn't have an official IDE on any platform than Windows—if you run Linux or Mac, it's too fucking bad.

A lot of people who like *nix are precluded from it, without some sort of major workflow change. After getting excited about OSS languages, it's hard to just dump that and go full-stack Microsoft. Hell, a place I just interviewed at literally has everything through Microsoft that's feasible. IIS to the damn mice. And SourceSafe.

aespinoza3• 15 years ago

Our production environment is running on Windows + IIS + .Net, but we are moving everything to Mono. It is working for us. We are working on a stack based on Debian + NGnix + Mono. We are already using PostgreSql and Mongodb as as a data storage; we use Git (@ Github) for our repositories, and TeamCity for CI.

I do agree, the OSS stack for .Net is not as nice as Microsoft's, but in my case I mostly do everything with Emacs anyways, so it doesn't bother me. MonoDevelop is not bad though.

aaronblohowiak• 15 years ago

> .NET doesn't have an official IDE on any platform than Windows—if you run Linux or Mac, it's too fucking bad

Unofficial, but actually pretty decent (if you are into IDEs) is MonoDevelop.

vyrotek• 15 years ago

Dupe from 7 Months ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557461

And we use .Net for our startup :)

evoltix2• 15 years ago

Same here. :)

aespinoza3• 15 years ago

Same here.

grifter• 15 years ago

igualmente :].

co-founder of a very-recently Google & Atlas Venture backed startup (so not an investment deterrent; no issues on the engineering deep-dive during diligence, and received kudos on our architecture and some clever stuff we developed). love .NET and the MSFT support & team over at azure... been on it since beta circa 09'. I'm also an avid python numpy & matlab programmer, even submit patches to and support a few open source python libraries (ps: flask is my favorite web framework).

in this discourse (and that of the original article and its comments) of the original article) I've encountered a tremendous amount of opinion/perspective that contrast my own/teams, and the experiences we've had - so I'm sharing my thoughts below. I may not address each questions but it's at least a stream of consciousness evoked by the topic.

(btw: I came from an all-java shop (oracle) by way of a company they acquired in '07.)

our language is C#, target framework 4.0.

- misc: C# is semantically equivalent to Java, virtually the same for the core libraries; syntax and the nuance of the latter aside it's easy to embrace engineers from the opposing worlds within each others framework. - diamonds in the rough: there is a treasure-trove of very smart previously inaccessible engineers toiling away in corporate waste-land, skilled in C#, and ineligible (by syntax/familiarity guidelines) for lots of startup reqs. example: we have a brilliant mathematician on our team that's been coding in C# since its release, working for investment banks where C# was the internal language of choice. as always, it's really about the person, not the language (look at what php's done to push the envelope with PHP... mysql...).

- .NET in terms of limited capability: we've written some pretty heavy non-linear optimization frameworks, stuff that while easy to prototype in python, we've found much more maintainable in C# due to the VS IDE, static typing, and the effectiveness & patterns they beget. also the efficiency inherent in some of the data structures to their static nature has been noticeably performant. (btw, latest CLR has truly dynamic types, and an independent fully dynamic runtime DLR.)

- prototyping: django's beautiful admin framework aside, .NET MVC 2 via C# and Django via Python yield very similar efforts for prototyping. MVC has a struts-like template for pushing admin stuff up quickly.

- cool/weird stuff: we've built (and had one of the best software engineering companies attest to) an incredibly innovative multi-dimensional-map for 'moving' throughout a highly constrained NP solution space during non-linear optimization. C# and Java do not support generic generics (think maps of N # of maps with X type). we have code-generate this, and their super efficient. it's something you could just bang away on at python or in lisp to prototype quickly, but you would need careful optimize and code to get performant, and also maintainable and provable (mathematically) across a multitude of types inherited for varying different sources throughout a framework. object-oriented languages w/static typing afford you this. yes it could have been done in open source C++, C or Java, but we did do it in .NET. It's one of the fun and weird things we've worked on. inspiration is/should not be limited by a language, regardless if it's correlated, it's not causal. please see auto vector regression by one of this years nobel laureate in economics or this: http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/ - for quick intuition as to why. :]

- liquidity/exit event, and the choice: we didn't choose .NET due to a likelihood of acquisition, or not choose it in fear of it preventing one (I mean this as in every sense except that in which .NET made our business look more compelling; hone our competitive advantage, etc.) I agree for a framework company (solely depending upon the level of the framework) this could be critical, but for most companies where at least one level of abstraction (framework included) obviates development platform dependency from a decision to use the service, it's negligible. we chose it because of how pervasive windows and its embedded and compact environments were in some of the disparate systems we're integrating with. it made life easier. it's worth stating that, whilst I stand by my first sentence, a couple of our most likely acquirers do have predominantly microsoft stacks, or are c++ based and could assimilate our development ethos quickly.

- cost of tech: we're bizspark'd which made this venture possible, I agree, without that .NET would not have been feasible decision. we would have went java or python (especially given the fantastic client-side deployments dropbox was doing w/it at the time). we would not have chosen MONO - at the time ASP.NET via Mono scaled poorly and MVC didn't exist for it (digression: absolutely no way in hell anyone should build on the old asp.net forms paradigm or hold it against .NET now that MVC is an option: even excluding the IoC weirdness and its terrible pattern, I still cringe when I see .aspx extension on a site. that said MONO for our integration platform would have been perfectly fine.

- long term cost (post 3 years): azure is not expensive, like all platforms (I have EC2 and app-engine experience) if you optimize for it, you can make it cost-effective. more importantly, if you're not earning $ or in some cases raise/preserve capital after 3 years (or until you hit $1.5m in rev per the bizspark restrictions) what kind of business are running?

- source control: TFS (team foundation server) is fantastic, from its testing framework, bug repository, and with some hacking its workflow systems it's a tool I've found as powerful (but easier to configure) than clear case, the systems we used at oracle, and myriad other variants I've worked with over the years. it's not source safe :].

- complexity: we've had to lift up the hood quite a bit to accomplish what we wanted. "the ability to patch and pull in req's for changes to FOSS software" is but one way to customize. .NET offers many, down to the many ways you can override/overload/extend even the most isolated libraries with the latest syntax sugar, to getting your hands a little dirty in MSIL. while not the FOSS way, it's possible. whether or not it's ideal is a matter of perception - e.g. when you work in (and accept) a proprietary environment.

- developer vs. engineer culture: semantics here. probably the b&b of this article, I think culture, pervasiveness (not independent of the former), and founding team/CTO experience, and biz strategy sum up to the decision as to why people do or do not use .NET. I find it difficult to place a coefficient on each of those terms but it's empirically manifest that more often than not they weigh against the choice to use .NET. strategy includes cost, only recently (~3 yrs) obviated by bizspark. it's also the market stuff I mentioned. FOSS has existed for years as an alternative - this is why it's pervaded (among other reasons). I have no data on founder XP, but I've met very few others that have experience working in .NET languages, I think this is a big contributor to start culture & personality types and where most .NET developers dwell - that's why I labeled that intersection 'diamonds in the rough'. last statement should show how those terms are not mutually exclusive.

- language/tech zealots: agreed, they're everywhere. even people I respect tremendously just have this natural predilection toward their preferred tech and its advantages.

my .2e-1

observation: have you seen the wonderful and cross-platform [android, ios, win phone] natively compiled .NET tech miguel's team @ xamarin have been working on? I suspect the # of corp clients that are leveraging that tech and the exposure to consumers the app-serving end-devices have will inspire those corp developers to create their own apps eventually... could bring a lot of .NET favoring newcomers (and different demographic) into the startup scene - neither a bad thing.

alf• 15 years ago

As a programmer, would I choose to be a member of a community based on open and free information, one where contributions are open to all of humanity, or a community built to feed the bottom line of a large corporation? Especially considering large profits are possible with with both, why would I choose the latter?

xradionut2• 15 years ago

Many non-OSS software programs have a huge community to help developers/users/admins. MSSQL is a good example. You pay for development, support and documentation in addition to lining Redmonds pockets.

In the enterprise the cost of software is a small portion of expenses compared to the cost of developers. For a startup or smaller business, things can be different. But there are large chucks of the software development universe where there aren't OSS solutions, nobody wants to donate their time to do the grunge work.

jroseattle4• 15 years ago

This assumes that everything else is equal.

If the scope of what you're doing is such that all other things in consideration are actually equal, you have a very narrow view.

evoltix2• 15 years ago

Programmers may indeed lean toward using PHP, Python, or Ruby because of a cultural influence but I truly believe that the deciding factor is cost. New startups typically can't afford to use .NET because of the expense of licensing IDEs, MSSQL instances, etc.

I do agree that programmers should be generalists so they can quickly adapt to new languages and frameworks.

fmw• 15 years ago

Microsoft offers good deals to startups[1], so cost is less of a factor than you may think. However, most people start programming as a hobby before they start a company, so it wouldn't surprise me if the cost issue mainly factors in earlier in the chain (at the point where people learn e.g. MySQL instead of MSSQL because of pricing). Of course, Microsoft is doing its utmost to push their products to students and schools, because they are well aware of this issue. Hackers, on the other hand, like to experiment, so they will come across alternatives to MS products sooner or later.

There are plenty of successful startups on the Microsoft stack. Everybody knows about the Stack Overflow story, but there are a lot more examples under the radar. Especially little ventures started by business people (who sometimes seem to prefer the Microsoft stack) that do quite well financially, but may not be very innovative on a technical level. It is just as viable in terms of getting things done and that is the only thing that matters. Admittedly, it may be harder to find good hackers with .NET experience, but the same goes for Java these days and Facebook is even successful in hiring smart people that are willing to work with PHP. Java and .NET are obviously popular with uninspired "bread programmers" because they are the path of least resistance to a safe 9-to-5 job, but that doesn't mean that all Java or .NET work is boring (consider e.g. Java at Google or Twitter).

I wouldn't want to personally depend on the likes of Microsoft or Apple for my development stack because I wouldn't bet my company on anything that isn't free as in freedom, but from my point of view as a casual observer the .NET platform is a pretty impressive piece of technology. Just like some other initiatives by Microsoft, like MSSQL things that come out of Microsft Research (e.g. Simon Peyton-Jones is employed there).

1: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

azakai5• 15 years ago

I don't agree that it is mostly culture (and "ego").

Purchasing/licensing software is always a hassle. Even aside from the monetary cost, you need to decide which to buy, go through the purchase process, and sometimes you also have some activation hassle.

With open source software, you just download it and use it. If you decide to change to another version of the software or different software entirely, you just do that.

Startups are hard, removing anything that takes time or effort is a good thing.

But even with this, cost is still an issue. Yes, salaries are the biggest cost, but in a startup, you might be working for yourself, so no salaries are being paid. Having to shell out any money at all becomes something you avoid. (Yes, there are Microsoft programs to give you Microsoft software at very low prices. But the procedure for those programs is always more complicated than "download and run".)

commandar2• 15 years ago

>Purchasing/licensing software is always a hassle. Even aside from the monetary cost, you need to decide which to buy, go through the purchase process, and sometimes you also have some activation hassle.

This. Navigating MS licensing is an absolute headache inducing time vampire for smaller organizations.

mw632142• 15 years ago

What I hear you saying is: "There could/should be a better way to do it". Adding ", hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...." to the end of that statement may be of some use to you or others, financially.

diminish• 15 years ago

Very good point; the cost consideration. In addition;

1. While building software architecture and designing features day by day, no startup wants to consider licensing schemes of proprietary software as a factor.

2. No startup wants to consider bullshit sales-minded product versions (professional, enterprise...)

3. No startup wants the over-paid software sales people to chase their profits tomorrow by inventing licensing schemes per user, cpu, expires in x years etc.

Startups want flexibility and freedom while innovating. Open Source (for example, Linux, MySQL Server, Rails/Ruby) give all those freedoms.

And innovation requires freedom while thinking.

Edit: I am a former MS solutions architect/programmer who built large web applications using .Net, Commerce Server, Sharepoint and various MS products between 2001-2005. Since 2006 I build exclusively using open source alternatives; and God, what a relief.

jablan• 15 years ago

> If you decide to change to another version of the software or different software entirely, you just do that.

I think this is the main point here. Especially in startups, parts get written and rewritten many times. Ruby backend too slow? Rewrite in Scala/Java/C++. Relational database doesn't quite fit? Extract a part of it into MongoDB etc. Besides, the community behind all these tools is healthy and responsive. Example: we had a stupid problem with Redis, asked on the forum and the guy who wrote Redis responded in matter of hours. Hell, maybe he even reads these words right now (hi!).

Call it cultural, call it technological, but there is quite a difference between two worlds.

gm4• 15 years ago

Really people? You guys are engineers by trade (and good engineers, at that, no?) and you find licensing daunting?

Let's assume you are out of BizSpark, which gives you what you need for free. Now you have a list of licenses to acquire.

What I did last was to call CDW, they put me in touch with their MS licensing guy which actually looks at this stuff full time, he took our info down and simplified our options and it was a quick decision after that.

This is just superfluous complaining, IMO. It's not that hard. And activation was not a big deal with volume licensing. Plus activation issues are a one-time things.

cbs• 15 years ago

Its not that they're hard per se, they're just another pain in the ass, especially when the alternative is a proven technology obtainable with a no-bullshit grab from a repository and then can be used whenever wherever for whatever.

robocat3• 15 years ago

I am an engineer, and a founder of a small company using Windows and SQL Server. The licences are a time sucking headache - mindless legal crap, hidden liabilities, and confusing interdependencies.

The BizSpark stuff is the worst (read it carefully: what you can do with it is VERY limited compared with what the marketing materials imply you can use it for).

easp2• 15 years ago

Microsoft has put a lot of effort into structuring their licensing to maximize their profits. One of the techniques they've used is to make the licensing complex enough that people over-pay to be on the safe side.

Sounds like you took the path of least resistance with Microsoft licensing, and may have paid significantly more for the privilege.

Maybe that was the right business decision for you, but its hardly a refutation of people who decide that open source licensing is a lot less hassle: No BizSpark application to fill-out, no fear of expensive licensing gotchas once they outgrow BizSpark.

powertower8• 15 years ago

The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team.

Using open-source tools to save a few dollars is a sure sign of either incompetence or inexperience, and a soon-to-fail project.

robocat3• 15 years ago

The costs are significant for a ramen profitable startup. For example production licences for MSSQL are not cheap. Each virtual machine for a dev is a problem.

For a small startup, the cost is the time it takes to try and understand your licencing agreements - it wastes a lot of time...

azakai5• 15 years ago

> The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team.

Not for a pre-seed startup. In that common situation, software licensing costs can be by far the biggest cost you have.

> Using open-source tools to save a few dollars is a sure sign of incompetence, inexperience, and a soon-to-fail project.

Saving a few dollars in return for tools that are on average of similar quality - sometimes better, sometimes worse - is in no way like what you just described.

dextorious3• 15 years ago

"""The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team."""

1) You keep using these words: rounding error. I don't think they mean what you think it means.

There are startups, and successful ones, that have the tiniest of budgets. People literally survive on ramen and faith. For those kind of companies, the costs are not a rounding error -- and there's often no salary or minimal salary paid to the 3-7 man team initially, while they still have to have some servers and development tools.

2) It's not just the licensing costs. Even for a team with tons of cash that makes them negligible, depending on a stack fully determined by some other company is not a good idea. Startups rewrite stuff all the time, use different technologies when they find out the old doesn't fit nicely enough, etc. You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component...

Meai• 15 years ago

I don't think that's it, I like to think that many people desire to use C# but that ASP.NET is scaring them off.

There are also no success stories of Mono on the serverside. If I use Java, I can rest assured that Google and Twitter have solved those problems before me.

Even if you do client development: WPF is perceived to be the only choice for gui c# development, and WPF is pretty complicated.

As much as I dislike the (XML and other) bloat: Java seems like a safe choice to me. Plus, there are going to be new JVM based languages, like Ceylon.

eftpotrm• 15 years ago

I'm not actually a great fan of ASP.Net in it's original incarnations (as what I and probably you from the sounds of things know best), but it's hardly this useless technology no-one on scale uses. Microsoft have been serious for years about dog-fooding their tech and I'm pretty sure you'll find Hotmail runs on ASP.Net. That's big enough scale for me.

j452• 15 years ago

Stack Exchange comes to mind for me when I think .NET startup. I haven't worked with .NET much in the last 4-5 years, but there's obviously more out there. Maybe they don't spend time sharing.

If you ask me, customers don't care what you code in. Only that you solve a need they have.

Most languages are capable.

Most languages have capable frameworks.

Most have open source options.

If a Language+Framework saves you time in one way, it will probably take up some more time in some other place. You can find such examples in probably everything. Assuming reasonably equal developers in any language, choice of Language+Framework is generally preference and opinion.

Any capable developer can learn any Language+Framework. Some are quicker to pick up in the beginning. Some catch you long term if you don't learn them deep.

Very few startups are technically complex enough to benefit from a specific feature of just one platform, to justify that platform alone. Such technically complex enough startups typically use a number of technologies/languages together.

An interesting trend I've noticed is how so many culturally popular rapid development languages (Ruby, Python, Scala, etc.) are becoming a part of the polyglot world through the JVM (JRuby, Jython, etc.).

What would there be left to distract ourselves with from building a startup if Language+Framework was no longer something for us developers to keep ourselves busy with?

xradionut2• 15 years ago

"If you ask me, customers don't care what you code in. Only that you solve a need they have."

Bullshit. Many (mostly larger) customers, do care. They may have security, regulatory or other needs that you must fulfill.

j452• 15 years ago

In the context of this post (startups): - most of which are SaaS; - mostly targeting SMB or Consumers (>95%?), - most of those customers don't know what a language is.

I do appreciate the subtle clarification. Done enough enterprise sales/development cycles too, and a difference can be present :)

petedoyle2• 15 years ago

"Essentially, the cost differences have become moot"

No, not really. I specifically ruled out .NET because BizSpark expires after 3 years or >1 million USD in annual revenue (whichever comes first).

I just don't see a ton of advantage to running .NET/SQLServer/etc over something like Java/PostgreSQL/etc. I'm sure some .NET dev will disagree.

There's just so much flexibility in being able to spin up as many instances as I want without licensing restrictions. For example, a .NET deployment might require larger instances to decrease the per-machine licensing costs, whereas I can do whatever-the-hell-I-want with an open source stack.

BizSpark is free only if you expect to not be around in 3 years.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

BizSpark is free only if you expect to not be around in 3 years.

That's not really the point of BizSpark. It's to get you to the point where SW licenses aren't a huge expenditure. At my company we have a general policy on SW "If it will make you more productive -- buy it." No questions asked.

We spend over $200k/year on each developer. Almost no developer purchases $10k/year in SW, but if they did, it's really not that big of a cost for us. And if there's a small improvement in productivity it's worth it.

But for companies where everyone eats ramen, but only when on sale, the cost of licenses is a big deal. I've seen startups where they require each dev to buy their own machines. I've seen other startups that pay half their annual salary for the first year and then will double your salary the next year -- as a way to get out the gate with lower costs.

If MS SW has no value then it has no value if its free. But if it does have value then the license costs really aren't that substantial.

petedoyle2• 15 years ago

I agree that productivity trumps cost. Its clear that .NET and the rest of the MS stack (if you choose to use them) absolutely do provide value.

But so do Rails / Grails / Java / Django / MySQL / PostgreSQL / Redis / Cassandra / Linux / et al., with zero licensing cost (or headache), better deployment flexibility, and the ability to customize them or fix any bugs that are in your way.

Certainly arguments can be made one way or the other on which stack provides more value in terms of time/labor/skills/flexibility, etc.

That said, the article was much to quick to dismiss cost as a factor due to BizSpark.

robocat3• 15 years ago

Completely agree.

To add to your point, from the BizSpark FAQ: " BizSpark software is for design, development, test, and demo only." You have no licence to use the software for any internal business use. E.g. sales guy can't use Office. The licence has so many catch-alls to prevent "abuse" that what you can do is rediculously limited.

Of course, the activated software is very useful, and obviously MS isn't actually enforcing the rules... [edit] so BizSpark can be very handy during first few years, but indeed you are punting a big licencing hassle (staff times number of VMs).

mgkimsal2• 15 years ago

"At first glance, PHP and Ruby on Rails used to have a decided advantage on initial startup costs because they could be run using FOSS tools. However, Microsoft has been running their Bizspark program for a few years, which eliminates most of the startup costs normally associated with employing a .NET framework. Essentially, the cost differences have become moot."

Umm.... it just delays the cost. That's like saying putting something on a credit card is the same as getting something for free because both "cost" $0. You will end up paying to keep using those tools later on, but the thought is that in 3 years you'll be making enough that it won't matter. And that's probably a reasonable assumption, but it's now yet one more thing that you have to keep track of.

And... true, the cost is somewhat cheaper, but not everyone can take advantage of Bizspark in the first place. So... apply and wait, justify yourself, and perhaps get a pretty good deal on some MS software, or... just go use what a lot of other people are already using for free. It's not hard to see why open source tools win in a lot of situations.

heyrhett• 15 years ago

Greenspun had some great thoughts on this in 2009: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-...

Business Guy: Hands Microsoft a bunch of money, launches site on an ASP server with 64GB RAM. He is basically done with IT for the first few years of growth.

MIT Genius: Starts off trying to build a system that will scale, from the beginning. He creates about 6 months of IT work for himself. It works, eventually, but it was a lot harder than what the business guy had to do.

simonw• 15 years ago

Smart startup founder: bangs out a prototype with Rails or Django in a few hours / couple of days, sticks it on a $20/month VPS somewhere, sees what happens.

daliusd• 15 years ago

Smart Simon Willison: goes to programming conference with slogan "smart hackers, we need you" (or something like that) and sees how everyone implements it.

Really, you have inspired me to write trac openid plugin :-)

Overall smart plan looks good in many cases but there are things you can't prototype in couple of days. E.g. dropbox or rescuetime like services. If you do it poor nobody will care. Should you make conclusion that nobody cares? I have personally written rescuetime like program for myself but have not seen bussiness oportunity there. Actually I have not cared about that at all and friends to whom I shown it have not proposed to make bussiness out of it.

clyfe• 15 years ago

I read the article, in the Rails example conclusion is: no eager loading and in-memory paging. I'd rather call it "MIT Retard" not "MIT Genius". These are basic principles!

evilduck• 15 years ago

Not sure that I would call that post "great thoughts". Scenario #1 (business guy) required a significant amount of initial investment, Scenario #2 (MIT Genius) could have bootstrapped the site for $14/mo on AWS. They're two completely different strategies.

Punishker• 15 years ago

The first blog post was uneducated and old arguments. Of course you can make 1.7 oz burgers, but only the best can do that with .NET.

But this blog post is just rambling... Why isn't .NET used? Non-techies making technical decisions, or they're hipsters and want to join the PHP or Ruby pain train.

The fact is, .NET can allow you to develop faster than anything else, so these folks are casting about for excuses.

The alternative? Try CodeIgniter for PHP... that's a decent framework!

frou_dh• 15 years ago

I like .NET but have no interest in Windows.

Without Visual Studio, .NET isn't half as nice a development experience. (I wish Mono would take the same "native UI is important" approach to the desktop IDE as they do to mobile apps).

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

Strange that the author cites FOSS solely as a cost advantage, disregarding all support and extensibility benefits. I say this as someone who has been called on to grovel through tcpdumps with Linux network stack source in hand, and later hack a new command into the stock memcache server as well as its client extension for Zend.

jarito• 15 years ago

One of the issues that I noticed isn't mentioned is that Cloud servers with Windows are generally more expensive. For example, at Rackspace a 4GB Linux server is $175 / month while a 4GB Windows server is $233. You could use Azure, but then you are truly trapped into the platform.

I love .NET, but my startups are all in Ruby / Python.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Network effect.

Why don't startups use erlang? Or postgresql? Or lua?

Developers learn from each other. And they learn based on their work experience. A small team of developers or a single developer makes something using a given set of technologies and then more people are hired to work on it and those people then learn that technology and become proficient with it. And then maybe those developers go elsewhere to start other projects with that technology. It's the same with every skill and every technology.

People use what they know, and they acquire new skills largely from the influence of others. Thus there are skills and technologies that are more popular than others.

P.S. It doesn't help that there are significant roadblocks to switching to .NET such as a change of operating systems (or trying to work with mono) and licensing costs and hassle.

firemanx• 15 years ago

Re: the BizSpark cost that most folks are talking about

I've been in BizSpark for almost 3 years now (graduation date is April 2012), and hopefully I can add a bit to the conversation. I'll caveat this with the fact that I primarily develop on a MacBook these days and my target environment for most projects is Ubuntu or Debian, in Java and Ruby. However, I still do a fair bit of .NET work, and when I signed up for BizSpark I had the intention of building some .NET products with it. The ultimate reason why I moved on (and this has actually changed since then) from that original idea was that it was a pain in the rear to find a host who would honor your BizSpark licenses. So the choice was either try and deal with that mess, or buy my own gear and run my own infrastructure. I prefer to bootstrap, so like I said, I've moved on.

Anyway, on the cost of BizSpark - you get to keep all the production licenses you spin up in the 3 years or pre-1 million mark. Even if you graduate early, you get to keep, for free, all of those licenses and use the for perpetuity. On top of that, MS (at least for my account, but I'd assume others) has waived the $100 graduation "fee".

That means I've gotten 4 Windows Server and SQL Standard processor licenses for free, which I can use perpetually with no cost. I can also keep all of the dev tools, etc that I was granted via BizSpark, at no cost. And with folks like Amazon now allowing you to supply your own licenses, it makes it easier to put those Windows licenses to work.

I really enjoyed the .NET development I did. The platform has issues like any other, but presents a really integrated environment for just getting something together and getting it out there, and allowing for a pretty significant cost for performance ratio that is supplemented by a really nice core platform (I'm a fan of C#, in particular).

mrweasel2• 15 years ago

People seem to forget that the software you write has to run somewhere, on a machine, maintained by someone.

It's not that it's overly expensive to buy the Microsoft software, it's not free, but it's also not completely unreasonable. However, if you're able to find a good .Net developer, very often that same person isn't a good Windows Server administrator. Developers who know their way around languages like PHP, Perl or Python are also often more than capable of deploying the servers that are required to run the code later on.

A good Windows administrator cost money, a lot of money. A decent Linux administrator often comes bundled with the developer.

Of cause this isn't always the case that .Net developers are not qualified to run the servers, but I do run into them rather often. I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.

That being said, culture might be the biggest factor of them all.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.

Almost all PHP devs are webdevs. Only a small subset of .NET devs are webdevs. It's probably better to compare ASP.NET devs to PHP devs. And most ASP.NET devs can configure IIS.

mrweasel2• 15 years ago

Okay, I see your point, but the article seemed to imply that the topic was web development.

I'm glad that you found that most ASP.NET developers can configure IIS, but that's not my experience. Getting a site running is something that most can do, but there's a large cap between: "Hey it runs" and "I trust that this will perform and be secure in production and should any issue arise I can debug it and solve the problem".

But yes, I should have written that I was talking about ASP.NET developers.

jorgecastillo• 15 years ago

Off Topic

I will not go on to discuss this article. But I want to express a point of view that I have. I am starting to learn programming and for a lot of reasons, I think I rather learn an Open Source technology than a Microsoft one. Microsoft technologies are meant to work together and this will inevitably lead to you getting locked in, in a Microsoft environment. With Open Source technologies you always have options since they are platform agnostic even though they work better in UNIX-like environments. You can run any of the popular programming languages (Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) that are used in UNIX-like systems on Windows, and the server software used in UNIX-like systems is also available in Windows, but Microsoft technologies are Windows only. Other important difference is that Open Source technologies can be extended by their users, you don't have to beg anyone to extend the features of an Open Source technology.

At this moment my only computing device is an Android smartphone, you can't do much with it right, right. Ha, but guess what you can install Lua, Perl, Python & JRuby. With JRuby you can even access the full Android API. So I am learning Ruby from and with my Android smartphone. I bet I can't do this with Microsoft technologies.

http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

gecko2• 15 years ago

So I don't really work at a start-up in a meaningful sense anymore (Fog Creek is a decade old), but my team is just a few people, and we develop in a start-up-like mode for Kiln, which is written almost entirely on a WISC stack.

I really, really like .NET, ASP.NET MVC, and C#. And I even have grown to appreciate IIS 7 and SQL Server. But if I left this company and did a start-up project all over again, there is no way in hell I'd pick .NET for the kinds of things I find interesting.

Here's the rub: whenever we're doing something in Kiln that Microsoft anticipated, the environment is among the best I could possibly imagine. There is something they already wrote that works, makes sense, runs quickly, and is flexible without taking you into IoC debugging hell. If you want to take on something that is not using cutting-edge web technologies (i.e., you're not using WebSockets, or working with big file uploads, or doing strange routing, or what have you), you're probably in great shape.

But when we do something that Microsoft did not anticipate, it's nothing but pain. Take allowing you to push Mercurial requests through HTTP: we still get into fights with IIS, two years down the line, because we keep encountering limits that Microsoft set that make absolutely no sense if you're not a vanilla CRUD app, and whose removal is poorly documented. For example, IIS limits the amount of headers you can have. This setting isn't actually even set in IIS proper; it's set in the generic HTTP layer of Windows, which can only be altered with a full-blown machine reboot. So when one of our customers dutifully managed to craft a Mercurial request that was over 8k or whatever the limit was, we had to go reboot every last fricking production web server during our peak load time so that they could actually get their changesets through.

Or take streaming requests: ASP.NET is so insanely aggressive about not allowing you to stream in requests that we had to replace swaths the official framework with our home-grown solutions before ASP.NET finally relented and quit trying to suck multi-gigabyte requests into RAM.

Or take LINQ to SQL. LINQ to SQL is great. Usually. If you're using it exactly as they intended. When we wanted to make some of our models automatically supply some query parameters, though...well, let's just say there was a lot of T4 templating involved to get around sealed classes, and leave it there.

I think the successful start-ups are the ones that are most likely to be doing something "weird." And when you're doing something weird, I think that Microsoft is the wrong stack to use.

If you ask me, that's why start-ups tend not to use .NET.

lucisferre• 15 years ago

I work primarily in .NET and I completely agree with these sentiments. I couldn't have said it better but I'll add my $0.02 anyways.

.NET isn't necessarily slow* to work with (GSD, not benchmark wise), but it can be very restrictive and limiting to work with. This is probably great for "enterprise" (whatever that means anymore) where cutting edge technology is considered inherently risky, but in modern startup environments it's just not going to cut it. Community involvement and maturity is part of it too, a talent pool that has a lot more myopic developers who have limited themselves to one language, one framework and one stack is another. Windows as an environment is a third reason, it just doesn't have the same flexibility, tooling and automation of * nix environment. Fun, as a purely subjective reason, is a fourth, I just see * nix devs having more fun with the tools they are using and the stuff they are building.

*though in my own experience the incredibly strict static typing of C#/Java feels slow to me. If I'm trying to design my software well so that it is extensible, understandable and maintainable I find I have far less trouble with this in Ruby, even considering that I have far more skill and experience in C#. That's just my personal experience so YMMV obviously.

gaustin• 15 years ago

> Or take LINQ to SQL. LINQ to SQL is great. Usually. If > you're using it exactly as they intended. When we wanted to > make some of our models automatically supply some query > parameters, though...well, let's just say there was a lot > of T4 templating involved to get around sealed classes, and > leave it there.

I solved what sounds to be a similar problem using reflection and the Linq ExpressionBuilder class(and related classes). It actually turned out really clean and powerful.

gecko2• 15 years ago

That's roughly what we did: the T4 template work in combination with a cache that a) takes LINQ expression trees with invalid, though ITable-compliant, classes; b) swaps out the ITable-compliant classes for LINQ to SQL's Table classes; c) compiles the expression tree into SQL; d) caches it, so we only have to pull this stunt once.

The power of Microsoft's tools is that this is possible. The bane of them is that it was necessary in the first place.

chernevik• 15 years ago

I recently hacked around a bug in a Python / API interaction by sending the request with Python system call to curl. I'm sure this was Not Right, but it did get'er done and on deadline. I suspect the API was somehow out of standard.

I figured out the problem 1) reading the Python code and 2) with what I'd learned about HTTP requests fooling around with curl scripts on the commandline.

No doubt a similar hack is available somehow in .NET / Windows. But I'm not sure that, outside a *nix environment, I'd have known about curl, or played with it enough to learn enough HTTP basics to figure out the problem in the first place.

leoh• 15 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/

cwp• 15 years ago

I think ChuckMcM made the best comment[1] on this issue that I've seen yet, after Scoble alleged that reliance on .Net is what caused MySpace to stagnate. Basically he argued that having control of your entire stack gives you the ability to iterate faster at scale. When you've got a vendor like Microsoft supplying large parts of the stack you can't do that.

When I read this, my first reaction was to think, "yeah, but how often do you really do any kernel hacking?" But actually, I've been on teams that have done all of the following:

* run a patched version of PHP in production

* run a patched version of the Squeak VM in production

* run a custom-built Apache in production (no patches, but highly-tuned build configuration)

* run a patched version of the OS X automounter daemon for office infrastructure

Ok, it's not the kernel, but it's fixing problems and implementing features at the right place in the stack instead of working around them and waiting for a vendor to ship a new version. I'm not the right guy to do kernel-hacking, but I know that those people are out there and I can hire them to do what I need, if it should come to that.

So, sure, it's cultural. But part of that culture involves not being enthused by the idea of waiting for Microsoft or IBM or Oracle to fix a problem that's affecting my customers now.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2369462

powertower8• 15 years ago

> alleged that reliance on .Net is what caused MySpace to stagnate.

Sure, that's what caused it.

ct• 15 years ago

yep totally agree, definitely not the awful layouts, automatic music playing, blinking animated gifs everywhere that caused MySpace to stagnate. Definitively it was the backend code that caused people to not want to visit MySpace again...

mgkimsal2• 15 years ago

A bit OT, but... what "support" do you get if you purchase MS licenses? Do you get support included with those, or is that extra?

A local .net guy was telling me the standard MS line of "it's more expensive to use open source than MS software", and cited costs of a support contract for RHEL and MySQL as being through the roof.

"Most companies I know don't pay for annual support contracts for open source software, " said I.

"Well, no enterprise is going to run anything without 24/7 support contracts in place, and MS ends up being a lot cheaper", said he. It went on for a bit after that.

I've not done much MS work in a while, and haven't worked with it in an enterprise-level capacity for a several years. What support do you get just from the license? Or is support a separate purchase/cost?

Separately, I was at a MS-oriented conference a couple years ago and heard a speaker touting that MS was actually cheaper to run for virtual hosting providers, but all virtual hosting providers charge more for Windows-based hosting because they knew they could make more money from Windows people, because they were already accustomed to "paying for software". Apparently it had nothing to do with paying for Windows licenses - even with 'free' Linux distros, his stance was that it was 2-3x more expensive to administer Linux boxes than Windows boxes. I was rather flummoxed, because it went against about 10 years of my own hands-on experience playing in both worlds.

zmitri• 15 years ago

I use C# 4.0 sometimes at my job and it's actually quite well done. The team was right on the money with their implementation of anonymous functions, functional programming paradigms (they don't use common naming conventions like map and reduce, though unfortunately), and variable assignment (you basically never need to explicitly state your types in fact, the key word is var, just like in javascript).

jroseattle4• 15 years ago

Why anyone evaluates .Net as something uniquely different to other languages/frameworks/platforms is beyond me. It has a certain set of capabilities, some it does really well, others not so well. Pretty much like any other language/framework/platform.

As with any application or system being built, the available options for building said application should be evaluated and compared for strengths/weaknesses. Whether those fit into an organization's plans is for the organization to decide.

jiggy20114• 15 years ago

Except with .Net you are subscribing to a whole set of things. Windows + IIS and everything else that comes with it.

If you choose python you can deploy to Linx/BSD/Solaris or even Windows. Also you get a nice choice of HTTP servers to run it on.

jroseattle4• 15 years ago

Thanks for proving my point. It's all about consideration.

Unless you're suggesting a platform that rules them all?

jinushaun• 15 years ago

Exactly. You can't take on the .NET stack piecemeal. It's all or nothing and extremely difficult to color outside the lines.

jiggy20114• 15 years ago

The main reasons I can see for a startup not to go .NET/MS Stack.

1) It is maintained exclusively by 1 company, if MS decide to kill off part of the platform or let it stagnate and you have a huge base of code based on it you are going to be missing out on the cool new stuff the ruby/python etc guys are getting. In the event that MS went bankrupt or decided to totally change their business model (i.e focus on consumer products) you are essentially screwed.

Also if they decide to change how their tools work (even just change the GUI around) your pretty much forced to re-learn it, this happens less on unix.

2) Licensing costs, sure these may not be that significant but they are subject to change and however small they may be you are competing with free.

3) Familiarity, Allot of startups probably hire recent bright college grads. These guys will have used desktop windows at some point, but they are very likely to have also installed Linux/BSD on a spare computer at some point and setup apache etc on it by reading stuff on wikis/blogs even if just for kicks. How many of them are likely to have installed a Windows 08 server on their own computer and figured out how to set it all up properly by reading MCSE manuals? It's somewhat different from setting up Windows desktop. It's also pretty complicated, I once went on a 2 week course with work to learn how to do some things on Windows server, doing roughly the same things on Linux took about 2 hours to figure out (ok , the course was pretty slow paced so 2 weeks might not be fair).

4) It's windows, it has a reputation for security issues. While this may not be as common as it was , it still makes allot of people nervous when I talk about forwarding ports to a Windows box.

5) Lock in, once you are commmited to Windows stack there's not allot you can do to chop and change parts of your stack for other things, like for example use a different kernel or filesystem. On the other hand let's say your running Linux servers and decide to move to BSD (or apache to lighthttpd), most likely much less of a hassle.

To overcome these things they would need some serious selling points.

Other than backwards compatibility with older stuff is there really a good reason that MS needs to build it's own OS kernel etc?

If they announced tomorrow that the next version of Windows Server would run a BSD kernel but they would port .Net + Active Directory + Windows GUI and everything else over to it would anything really be lost?

vitalychernobyl• 15 years ago

I hate to state the obvious cultural argument - but how many of us just don't like Microsoft, and all things being equal, would prefer to work with open source? I sure do.

praptak• 15 years ago

Culture only? What about the costs of scaling? Having chosen the .NET stack, can I just set up 15 more servers without paying for any additional licenses?

jarjoura• 15 years ago

I honestly wanted to give .NET a try. I built a machine and installed Windows Server on it. I knew that Ruby/Python have scalability hurdles to overcome if things were to take off. So I felt .NET vs. Java was the way to go.

Ultimately, the .NET toolset is just not as flexible. If you want to do anything outside of its intended use cases, it requires so much extra work and code. What took me a weeks worth of time took me 1/2 a day in Rails for example.

It looks like people at Microsoft are listening in a way by embracing Javascript. I'd be really interested to see where their nodejs effort ends up in a year.

forgotAgain• 15 years ago

Not really. If startups thought .Net was the better answer they would use it.

I released my first .Net based application when .Net was at version 1.1. I've developed with it consistently since then.

I'm getting ready to release a new SaaS type application in the first half of 2012. It will be based on an open stack. If I had based it on .Net I would most likely be in production now given the advantages of my background.

I would have loved to use Azure as a platform but I had one problem with it. I could not figure out what the cost would be at different usage points. Microsoft has transferred their licensing labyrinth from the Enterprise to the cloud.

BizSpark allows Microsoft to claim that their stack costs the same a FOSS stack but their claim is disingenuous. Once you get past the BizSpark time limit there is a vast nothingness available to software companies looking to plan their future in the cloud on .Net.

tewolde• 15 years ago

A point to consider is that having .net or php on a resume gives a lot less information than say having ruby or python.

As a hiring manager I want developers who are interested in their craft beyond merely what they learned in school. Seeing experience with obscure tech or less popular languages is an easy way to spot this.

Assuming the candidate can back up what they say on the resume, it shows that they have enough confidence and ability to go off the beaten path.

oldprogrammer• 15 years ago

There are two main reasons we chose to use .NET for our startup. The first is that .NET is what we know. The second is Bizspark and its free use of Windows Azure.

--Bizspark/Azure-- We signed up for Azure, which took about 10 minutes to fill out a couple web forms describing what we were doing and provided a link to our "coming soon" page. Five days later we were accepted and within 30 minutes we had our Ultimate MSDN subscription and Azure account created. But it wasn't really about the MSDN subscription (which is a nice bonus, though), as we already had Windows 7 installed and we could have used the Express development products just as well as the ultimate ones. In terms of licensing long term, we're not using any of the server licensing, as everything is hosted on Azure. So we'll never have to endure the licensing hell people have referred to. If in 3 years we're not able to pay our hosting bill on Azure then it's time to stop on working on this startup.

On Azure we're taking advantage of the two compute instances, the SQL Server database, and the Blob storage. That's a powerful hosting framework for free. The other options we were considering was Google App Engine with Python/Django, or Heroku with Rails. We had decided on those 3 options because we didn't want to be sysadmins or feel like we needed to hire one. We wanted scability without having to think about it. And since we're not working on a 100 million user project we're not going to need super-customized server optimizations. Being pragmatic about it, going with GAE or Heroku would have been more expensive than free and would have required us to use languages and frameworks we were not 100% familiar with.

--Using what you know-- We would have been deciding to use Rails or Django "just because" with no real benefit. Building a new product is hard enough without trying to learn a new language/framework/server/os. In the past few years I've experimented with Ruby on Rails and various Python frameworks hoping to discover for myself the magic that had captured the hearts of so many developers, but I always kept coming back to .NET when it was a project that required me to be at my best. Deep down I think I wanted to fall in love with Rails or Django because I prefer living in OSX over Win7. Rails just felt like a mess to me, and Django just didn't click. While there is a lot to like about Ruby and Python, my 7 years of experience using C# pays dividends in productivity.

--Lock-in-- People always mention "lock-in" when talking about .NET. But the truth is that there is lock-in with whatever technology you sink your time into. If you spend 6 months building a product in Rails/MySQL/Linux you're just as locked in as you would be if you spent 6 months building in .NET/SQL Server/Win64. Many of the commenters have talked about needing to tweak the OS, tweak the web server, tweak the database server, etc. If you're a new startup worrying about that, then you've already set yourself up for failure through premature optimization. Focus on building your product and getting a few paid users.

Many have also stated that going with .NET means being stuck in MSland and unable to mix and match tech like you would be in OSSland. I think that's a false dichotomy. If we're talking about mixing a web framework with a database, for example, it's very easy to use .NET with Oracle, MySQL, Postgresql, MongoDB, etc. In fact, it's probably easier than with Rails or Django where I remember having a heck of time getting drivers to compile on my Mac. And these days, it's fairly common to use OSS tools with .NET. Microsoft's own ASP.Net MVC, NUnit, Specflow, jQuery, Sass, Coffeescript, etc., to name a few.

Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

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