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Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

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Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#31

Post by etherealG »

jasonkester wrote: post #14

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 throu…

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#32

Post by desu »

jasonkester wrote: post #14

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 throu…

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#33

Post by rbanffy »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #25
asnyder wrote: post #9

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.

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?

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#34

Post by asnyder »

StrawberryFrog wrote: post #19
asnyder wrote: post #9

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.

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…

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#35

Post by rbanffy »

jasonkester wrote: post #14

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 throu…

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#36

Post by DanielBMarkham »

rbanffy wrote: post #35
jasonkester wrote: post #14

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 throu…

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. A…

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?

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#37

Post by jasonkester »

etherealG wrote: post #31
jasonkester wrote: post #14

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 throu…

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.

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#38

Post by jasonkester »

tvon wrote: post #20
jasonkester wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Compared to PHP or Django (which we also do consulting in), ASP.NET is just plain faster to develop in. I'd love to see any info backing this up.

It's all subjective. Naturally, I've done my share of development across a wide range of frameworks and languages, and I've made my choice. The best advice I can give would be to do so as well.

Personally, I consider it a slight competitive advantage that so many shops avoid Microsoft stuff on ideological grounds. If they never try it, they'll never know. And we'll have that slight edge in getting things to market faster.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#39

Post by steverb »

windsurfer wrote: post #28

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?

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

Enjoy your straw man.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#40

Post by jasonkester »

desu wrote: post #32
jasonkester wrote: post #14

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 throu…

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.

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!

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