Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#41

Post by cwp » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:21 PM UTC

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

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#42

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:22 PM UTC

juddlyon wrote: post #2

"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.

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.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#43

Post by eftpotrm » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:26 PM UTC

Meai wrote: post #12

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…

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.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#44

Post by gm » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:29 PM UTC

azakai wrote: post #11

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 t…

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.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#45

Post by mgkimsal » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:32 PM UTC

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.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#46

Post by petedoyle » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:33 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #32

petedoyle wrote: post #14

"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…

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 th…

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.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#47

Post by powertower » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:34 PM UTC

azakai wrote: post #11

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 t…

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.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#48

Post by daliusd » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:35 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #39

heyrhett wrote: post #16

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, ev…

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.

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.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#49

Post by powertower » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:36 PM UTC

cwp wrote: post #41

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…

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

Sure, that's what caused it.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#50

Post by clyfe » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 9:36 PM UTC

heyrhett wrote: post #16

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, ev…

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!