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

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

#101

Post by azakai » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 5:46 PM UTC

powertower wrote: post #92

dextorious wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""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…

> 1) You keep using these words: rounding error. I don't think they mean what you think it means. I've used those words once. > You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component... No. But you can be dragged down with buggy, poorly engineered, and badly integrated tools.

>> You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component...

> No. But you can be dragged down with buggy, poorly engineered, and badly integrated tools.

And that has nothing to do with whether they are proprietary or open source.

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

#102

Post by ct » Sat, Dec 31, 2011, 3:55 PM UTC

powertower wrote: post #49

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.

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...

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

#103

Post by easp » Sun, Jan 08, 2012, 4:51 AM UTC

gm wrote: post #71

easp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refut…

Hrrmmm... I take the path of least resistance on everything. Why take the path of increased resistance? As long as you do not betray the long-term goal, the path of least resistance is absolutely the one to take. Always. Keeping on-topic: To a Windows-experienced team, the path of least resistance is to stay on Windows, even with its baggage. Same can be said for every other platform: Ruby guys, stay with Ruby all th…

I won't bother arguing with the received dogma of neo-classic economics and accept your premise that: that businesses strive to maximize profits, and that they should do so.

That wasn't my point. My point is that microsoft maximizes profits by making licensing so complicated that a significant percentage of their customer base over-pay for licensing rather than take the risk of being under-licensed.

Since you took the path of least resistance, you may have overpaid for licensing. If your goal, as a business, is to maximize profits, well, then, you've worked against your long-term goal.

It may be that the cost of overpaying microsoft for licenses was cheaper than the opportunity cost of figuring out how to pay less for licenses.

Which brings me back to my main point, it is no disgrace, as an engineer, to decide that Microsoft licensing is a problem better avoided.