Microsoft to support startups with free software/support

http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/BizSpark/Pages/At_a_Glance.aspx

by tialys • 18 years ago

7 6 18 years ago

tialys• 18 years ago

Seems like a cool offering if you REALLY need Windows, the $100 dropout fee seems kind of strange though. I might hop in just to get access to some of the technology -- some of those things are simply too expensive to try otherwise.

aschobel3• 18 years ago

This seems like a no brainer for any startup since they give you a free MSDN Premium subscription, which means you get a copy of MS Office, Exchange and Dynamics.

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite with MSDN Premium is usually $10,939. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscriptionsc...

That is a lot of software.

Kudos to Microsoft.

cabalamat2• 18 years ago

For $0 I can get Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, Java, MediaWiki, Mailman, Wordpress, OpenOffice, etc, etc.

With Microsoft, after 3 years, you have to start paying for everything. With the software I've listed above, I'll never be forced to cough up money for it, and I'll never be subject to vendor lock-in.

Microsoft's initial price of $0 looks attractive, but you'll never own the software so you have to factor in the Total Costs of Non-Ownership: they want to make you dependent on them so they can jack up their prices.

Most startups use Free Software running on a GNU/Linux platform, and Microsoft's BizSpark program is clearly a response to this. But people don't use Free Software because it's cheap, they use it because it's better -- which is why BizSpark will fail.

The BizSpark process also seems overly bureaucratic and there are questions as to what actually you are allowed to do with the software MS provide -- for my full review to BizSpark see http://www.includipedia.com/blog/2008/11/05/microsoft-bizspa...

aschobel3• 18 years ago

Technically you don't own FLOSS software either, never having to pay a license fee is very attractive.

Free is nice, but we still pay for commercial software. We spend $600 for each license of IntelliJ because it woks better for us than Eclipse.

Also, in the end you want to build something people want.

If you have a bunch of engineers who are good at .Net, why not use the Microsoft stack to get that done quickly? Go out and build!

Microsoft to support startups with free software/support

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