Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/post/2009/09/05/Is-The-Microsoft-Stack-Really-More-Expensive.aspx

by dragonquest • 17 years ago

18 69 17 years ago

jondavis.net

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

Yes.

njharman2• 17 years ago

And in many ways other than monetary.

pclark• 17 years ago

how do you mean?

mr_luc3• 17 years ago

For instance, let's measure it in terms of hacker news comments.

The fact that this is identifiable from the title as a MS PR piece means that most HN regulars completely lack the desire to respond.

The very idea that the question is being asked is enough to indicate that any discussion would be pointless. Clearly, this person has a diametrically opposed worldview, and is going to try and win me over with arguments based on that worldview.

Cost of my "stack": $0. A free OS, a free IDE (emacs), free tools.

Well, I guess I paid for photoshop. ;)

jasonkester7• 17 years ago

If your chosen stack slows you down by being more painful/cumbersome to develop on, set up and maintain, then it's costing you money. The fact that it's lost income rather than extra outflow doesn't change the fact that it's a cost.

Compared to PHP or Django (which we also do consulting in), ASP.NET is just plain faster to develop in. I can get my own stuff out the door quicker, which means that I can bill more of my time to consulting clients, which means that I'm net ahead at the end of the month.

So I guess you need to stick opportunity cost into that equation to see where you actually stand.

acg• 17 years ago

On the Microsoft stack side, everyone knows about Visual Studio. The licensing cost for the Team Suite is $10,939. LAMP developers just love to point that kind of thing out. But folks, the fact is, that price is not measurable as the equivalent of LAMP freeware. It’s for an enterprise shop that needs very advanced and sophisticated tools for performing every corporate software role in a software development lifecycle.

These arguments are walking tightrope of avoiding the obvious. Installing all of the Microsoft free tools will make the stack cheaper. But as soon as you want to do something even close to challenging you can bet you'd need support and a license for the real tools. Apparently it's the open source crowd that is subjecting the "market" to FUD?

desu5• 17 years ago

Not to mention the subtle insinuation that the open source "freeware" is just a toy and everyone knows you have to pay for the real stuff.

I cannot imagine how Microsoft developers begin a project. "Today, I'm going to write this new web app to change the world! Right after I spend the day setting up Microsoft Team Studio and purchasing software licenses for every computer I plan to use!" How inspiring.

jasonkester7• 17 years ago

You realize that you can use the same copy of Visual Studio twice, right?

As in "Today I'm going to write this new web app, as soon as I install Eclipse, Django and SVN" would sound just as silly. It's just development tools.

Oh, and for what it's worth, Microsoft will give you 15 seats worth of MSDN Universal for $400 if you tell them you're a small business. Per seat, the MS tools are the cheapest part of setting up a new dev box for me. (CodeSmith, ReSharper and Ants Profiler are the ones that hurt!)

rgrieselhuber• 17 years ago

Of all of Microsoft's technologies, I have considered SQL Server, because from what I've seen it is an extremely powerful database engine with really good BI tools. There are two reasons I don't use it though: 1) it would be prohibitively expensive (for me anyways) to use across dozens of nodes and 2) it means introducing Windows into my environment, which quickly becomes very expensive and a nuisance.

javery2• 17 years ago

I agree completely, Windows isn't that expensive (look at the difference in EC2 pricing) but SQL Server is where they get you. It's not Oracle bad, but for a small startup it might as well be.

ams61102• 17 years ago

I haven't really paid attention recently, but at a conference several years ago a former Microsoft sales rep said that nearly every "enterprise" product they sold required accompanying SQL Server licenses.

gaius• 17 years ago

A small startup would sign up to the BizSpark programme, tho'.

st3fan• 17 years ago

Yeah .. haha .. "The shell and all that fluff is a separate download" .. fluff :-)

asnyder2• 17 years ago

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is, by far, a vastly superior RDBMS than most anything I have seen from anyone, in every respect

I was willing to continue reading the article, up to the above line, at which point it became clear that there's no basis for anything said.

StrawberryFrog3• 17 years ago

Which ones do you think is one a par with it, and why? "vastly" may be an overstatement, but it's very good.

The only issue is that for simple designs a smaller, free product (e.g. postgreSQL) may have all that you need.

A lot of the new stuff in SQL server seems to be Business Intelligence tools, which I don't pay much attention too. the SQL stuff where you "select * from ...." seems to be much the same for several versions now, and gets only minor updates since it's already done right.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

Well, while SQL Server has its merits, I wouldn't consider it vastly superior (or superior at all) to Oracle or IBM DB2, although SQL Server 2008 is indeed getting very close.

Of course it depends on your requirements; for most purposes MSSQL is perhaps a better choice but if I needed an enterprisey-schwenterprisey zero downtime database server no matter what it costs, then of course I would go for Oracle or DB2.

asnyder2• 17 years ago

Databases such as Oracle, and DB2 are either equal or better in certain respects. Furthermore, I personally find PostgreSQL to be on par if not better than MSSQL. Aside from PostgreSQL's inability to return multiple recordsets, IMHO it's easier to write stored procedures, functions, views, and triggers in PostgreSQL. In addition PostgreSQL is significantly more consistent syntacticly. Every so often my brother who works for an MS shop will ask me how to do something relatively complex in MSSQL, I'll show him how, but in addition I'll also show him how much easier it would've been in PostgreSQL.

One can argue that when working with SQL Server Studio you don't have to worry about how to do things since the IDE will create most of what you need. However, the same can be said of decent IDEs for PostgreSQL, such as EMS.

Personally, I like the ability to read my functions, views, and triggers, and be able to easily understand what's happening; which is not something I usually experience when working with MSSQL.

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

All the research I've seen shows Microsoft consistently in the top three as far as sales, and in the top two as far as sales on the windows platform. This has held true over many, many years.

Got some points you'd like to make that amount to something?

tvon3• 17 years ago

Sales don't magically equate to better technology or a superior product.

rbanffy3• 17 years ago

1: inertia

It took a long time to displace COBOL. Microsoft's technology is not superior. Their main advantage is the shady deals they have with computer manufacturers that push their software to people who don't know they do have options.

Oh... and BTW, where are the sales figures for all the people who download, say, Debian or CentOS or *BSD or OpenSolaris and just go about doing their business without showing in any sales chart?

That said, I find both Debian and OpenSolaris have strengths Microsoft doesn't. Do they have software management comparable to APT? Do they have file storage comparable to ZFS? Instead, people learn to live around their limitations and fail to notice there are better choices to whatever came bundled with their computers.

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

So, you believe judging quality boils down to how popular something is?

If you'd like for popularity to be the point of comparison, then Microsoft loses on pretty much every front in the war for the web server. PHP is more popular than any MS language for web development, MySQL is more popular than SQL Server for web development, Apache is (dramatically) more popular for web development, BIND is more popular, Postfix and Sendmail are more popular on the Internet at large than Exchange, and Linux is more popular on web servers than any MS OS. Apache runs 47% of the web, while IIS runs 23%. The remaining space is mostly taken up by other Open Source web servers, like nginx and Lighttpd.

kgrin• 17 years ago

Scaling horizontally is considerably more expensive on the MS stack, as the StackOverflow folks discovered recently ("discovered" is a poor word choice maybe). I distinctly remember a blog post or podcast where Jeff basically lays out the numbers and says that the software costs make scaling up more enticing than scaling out.

bad_user3• 17 years ago

SQL Server Express is so limited that you really can't use it in production, and I've never had a case where Postgresql or Mysql couldn't handle the load (with enough architecture tweaks).

And you still need IIS. You can get that with Windows 7 Ultimate, but that's $319.95 for the retail price. And you pretty much can't get away without buying the retail version. We have deployed 8 HTTP servers, 2 MySql servers, another server with Varnish, 2 servers with Memcached and one for logging ... for one of the applications we maintain. Of course, we're using virtualization with Xen. But if we were to use Windows 7 Ultimate, then we'd have to shell out ... 13 * 319 = 4147 USD

On such a quantity you can probably get a discount, but let's be honest ... 4147 USD is almost the price we payed on the hardware, and I wouldn't run anything else than Windows Server in production which is a lot more expensive.

And if you're developing on top of PHP, Rails, Django, Mysql, Postgresql ... why on earth would you want to use a Windows server?

joechung• 17 years ago

For reference's sake, Windows Web Server 2008 costs $469 and is likely the version of Windows you would use instead of Windows 7 to run IIS in production.

bengtan• 17 years ago

I don't trust a Windows server to provide reliable uptime. I have no other arguments that I wish to make.

trapper• 17 years ago

We recently deployed a system (linux based on a windows server with vmware) on a huge infrastructure provider. Every week the box was going down, and we asked why - it's because they reboot ALL microsoft servers once per week, across the entire infrastructure. He claimed they were so unreliable it's good practice. WTF?

Uptime on my first linux production server box was over 4 years.

Daishiman• 17 years ago

Yes, in all large shops a weekly/monthly reboot cycle is a requirement. Duly note that this requires several hours of overtime from sysadmins, adding additional cost.

jasonkester7• 17 years ago

This article was all over the map in terms of numbers. Here at Expat, we develop on the Microsoft stack whenever we have a choice in the matter, including for our own products such as Twiddla, Blogabond, Rootdown, S3stat, etc. and here's the breakdown of what we pay for what:

Tools: $399 total. For Everything MS makes, for every developer in the shop, once every 2 years. That's what it costs for an MSDN license through the EmpowerISV program.

Servers: ~$2000 per production box. That's Small Business Server, which comes with production licenses for SQL Server, Exchange Server, and pretty much all the backend stuff you could want.

And that's it.

Assuming we buy a new server every 2 years, that means we pay about $100/month for the privilege of developing on the MS stack. Put another way, that means that the MS stack need only gain us 20 minutes worth of productivity every month to pay for itself.

Like I said up top, we build on the MS stack whenever we have a choice in the matter. It's just a no-brainer.

etherealG• 17 years ago

take a look at the hosting cost on something like slicehost.com for a server. add in bandwidth costs to your server costs. does it still seem better to be developing on windows?

also, what are you charging your customers if 20 minutes or your time is worth $100, that's impressive. I wish I worked for a microsoft platform company so that customers would be willing to pay that much for a simple service.

jasonkester7• 17 years ago

That's actually what I imply above. Given that we pay $800/month for rack space, power and bandwidth, and would do so regardless of our development stack, the extra $100/mo for the luxury of developing in C# is just noise.

desu5• 17 years ago

And how does your reckoning change when the big day comes that you have to buy another server? And another? And then another 20? And you've locked yourself into the MS stack?

That $2k/box starts adding up real quick.

jasonkester7• 17 years ago

First off, I'm not a Microsoft salesman, so please take anything I tell you as the experiences of one person, and weigh it against your own.

That being said, one box on the MS stack can handle a lot of capacity. Enough that I'm constantly amazed to see other people's startups folding under the load of, say, a single slashdot article or a few thousand people kicking the tires at once.

The box that Twiddla lives on has seen some pretty heavy days, and it's never had its CPU over 5% in anger. Considering the number of paying users we'll need before we need to add a second one, well, I'd be delighted to pay another $2k out of that stack of money!

rbanffy3• 17 years ago

You failed to account for:

- mandatory downtime for updates: every couple months your Windows server has a bunch of security updates that require a reboot. It's no problem for a development server, but just measure the wait SQL Server takes to start on a high-load environment. Compare that to Linux where the only reason to reboot is a kernel update and even that will be soon be history.

- The added cost per server. As someone pointed out, if you have to scale to 10 or 100 servers (just imagine one of your apps got successful) you will soon have to deal with their account managers. And they will know exactly how bad your position is. And you are pretty much stuck with x86 hardware too. You just can't employ a a Sun Niagara server for front-end business (instead of 5 x86s) because it doesn't run Windows.

- You are stuck with their licensing/core/memory limitations. You can't just pop a couple more gigabytes of RAM or a couple more processors in your servers without paying because neither Windows nor SQL Server will use them without - gasp - a reinstall.

Windows is cheap. It's not always inexpensive.

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

You're seriously telling us that when the hardware changes, instead of updating the license, you have to reinstall the entire stack?

Got a link for that?

vetinari• 17 years ago

> Servers: ~$2000 per production box. That's Small Business Server, which comes with production licenses for SQL Server, Exchange Server, and pretty much all the backend stuff you could want.

Only if you don't plan to grow beyond 50 CALs. Then it skyrockets.

towndrunk• 17 years ago

So what is the cost when your EmpowerISV program ends?

makecheck2• 17 years ago

Microsoft's development products are not that good. I've used Visual Studio, and I found the interface so incredibly clunky that it was easier for me to mount a network drive to my Linux box, and use a real text editor, "vim", to modify the project XML directly to make changes. (And that is not a joke.)

And the set of downloads is irrelevant, because it shouldn't even be necessary. On Linux and Mac, most of what I need is already there; while I do download other packages from time to time, they're for good reasons (like getting a new version). The base Mac and Linux installations already have python and perl and a real shell and a real terminal and an SSH client and a good web browser, and the list goes on. The number of things Windows completely lacks out of the box is mind-boggling, given the size of Microsoft's budget. And remember, you have the privilege of downloading and installing it all again every 6 months when Windows' holes make your PC useless.

But it isn't even about the cost or quality for me. It doesn't take much of a history lesson to realize that the vast majority of Microsoft's wealth has come from questionable business practices; practices that resulted in "de facto standards" through which they gain even more undeserved business. At this point, they could have the best products imaginable (they sure don't), and they would still deserve no business.

The entire computing industry has been set back at least a decade due entirely to Microsoft (and a number of other IT-dependent industries have been harmed). Microsoft has destroyed entire companies through unfair means; Microsoft should receive no recognition whatsoever as a credible business, and should receive no new contracts. I know it's just wishful thinking now, but it's the absolute truth.

gjm11• 17 years ago

Eww. Among his arguments:

1. It's OK that the MS developer tools cost money, because there exists an IDE for Ruby, PHP, etc., that costs money. (No matter than Eclipse, NetBeans, etc., are free.)

2. It's OK that IIS/ASP.NET costs money whereas Apache/PHP doesn't, because ASP.NET is more sophisticated than PHP. (No matter that, e.g., Rails is also more sophisticated than PHP but is also free.)

3. You probably won't have to pay for Visual Studio, because typically your employer pays for it. (Apparently in Mr Davis's world costs don't count when they are paid by employers.)

desu5• 17 years ago

Windows can also execute all the Java and Ruby stuff that you see in nix platforms.*

Really? Hit any Ruby mailing list and every second post is a Windows user complaining that something doesn't work. Not just obscure things either - DataMapper doesn't work on Windows, or didn't a few months ago. Capistrano, the "official" Rails deployment tool, is not supported on Windows. And good luck with any gem that requires compilation.

Not to mention you lose out on all the command line tools. You'll need to install cygwin, of course. At that point you may as well just stop trying to run unix on a Windows box and just, you know, run Unix.

windsurfer4• 17 years ago

I know as a student, it's waaaay too expensive. I could eithter get 4 months of rent, or a legal copy of some microsoft software. Guess which one I chose?

steverb2• 17 years ago

Except that as a student you get most everything on the MS Stack for free.

Enjoy your straw man.

windsurfer4• 17 years ago

They have student pricing for microsoft server and sql?

Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

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