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Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

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Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#51

Post by tvon »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #43
tvon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So? At the very least they amount to people doing due dilligence and making the best choice they can. Now you can argue all those people don't really know what they're doing, and you sit in a position of actually knowing they're making a mistake, but that's all so much posturing now, isn't it? The point is, I'm providing stats, facts, information. It's great to be able to argue their relevance, because it's great to…

> So?

That seemed to be your point.

> At the very least they amount to people doing due dilligence and making the best choice they can.

No, it doesn't mean that, especially not if they follow your reasoning which I don't doubt a lot of them do.

It also seems like you're still pushing the same point, that sales numbers mean a better product.

> Now you can argue all those people don't really know what they're doing, and you sit in a position of actually knowing they're making a mistake, but that's all so much posturing now, isn't it?

So... because these people are in a position to buy software, they must be making the correct choices? To question the meaning of the SQL server sales figures is posturing? That's some blind faith in "people who buy things".

Odds are most people who have purchased MSSQL did so because they are hooking it up to Exchange or IIS in a company that is all Microsoft from top to bottom. Is this such a horrible thing? No. Like they say, nobody was ever fired for buying Microsoft. Does any of this mean that Exchange or IIS or MSSQL are better than the alternatives? No, it just means they are the safe and easy choices for people who make software purchases.

> The point is, I'm providing stats, facts, information. It's great to be able to argue their relevance, because it's great to have something more than an unfounded opinion to base a discussion on.

You're providing irrelevant stats, facts, information, and offering up an unfounded opinion that "higher sales mean a better product".

> Which is my point.

It may have been your intent, but it was not your point, at least not the point you seem to keep trying to make.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#52

Post by joechung »

bad_user wrote: post #11

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, anot…

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#53

Post by mr_luc »

jasonkester wrote: post #16
mr_luc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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…

I'm no PHP hacker, nor (sadly) am I unfamiliar with ASP.NET. I was stuck at an "agile", highly "successful" .NET shop for 2 years.

Client-corporate-intranet-land is completely divorced from the realm of what is possible. That entire world enforces such silly requirements on you that, well, maybe it is better to use .NET.

But who wants to work in that kind of an environment?

Who wants to use the MS tools to manage their servers?!? I'll take Puppet and Monit, thanks.

Opportunity cost? I develop with a REPL right there in emacs, so I can see how the running dev-server code is working, able to instantly see the effects of what I'm doing. Once I've got it where I like it, I type a single line, and my tests run, and if they all passed the app deploys to staging.

Where's the room for opportunity costs?

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#54

Post by fatdog789 »

tvon wrote: post #29
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Sales do mean that the technology they make is better suited to the actual needs of their clients, especially with re-sales to the same client.

It's sort of why the iCrap consistently dominates the mp3 market, despite the overwhelming lack of features: it is better suited to the simplistic needs of its users.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#55

Post by vetinari »

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…

> 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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#56

Post by rbanffy »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #36
rbanffy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you go beyond the license limits of your Windows or SQL Server and has to install the next product on the lineup, that's pretty much what you have to do.

Let's suppose you just added a couple extra Opterons to your server at the same time you decided to max out the memory available in the box. You went from single-socket quad-core to four-socket 16-core and from 32 GB to 128 GB (it's your database server, after all). What are you supposed to do? You will have to upgrade in-place. Unless I am very wrong (I never faced this situation - I am a Unix guy)

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#57

Post by SwellJoe »

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?

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#58

Post by Daishiman »

trapper wrote: post #24
bengtan wrote: post #12

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

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.

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.

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#59

Post by towndrunk »

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…

So what is the cost when your EmpowerISV program ends?

Re: Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

#60

Post by njharman »

pclark wrote: post #18
njharman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in many ways other than monetary.

how do you mean?

Wasted experience, when Microsoft decides to totally change their dev chain/libs for business/marketing reasons. VB, .net, activeX. Last 20 years of MS dev is littered with them.

Wasted time upgrading / relearning OS because MS has end of lifed it and requires new OS for tools to run.

Wasted opportunity when you discover there is market outside win32 but it's too expensive to target cause all your products/libs/experience is invested into a proprietary stack. Vendor lock in is expensive in other ways as well.

Inability to find/fix bugs in stack cause it is closed source.

Inability to tune/add feature/etc stack cause it is closed source.

Those are some of the first that come to mind. There have been essays, articles, papers, and blogs galore written about how and why closed, proprietary < open / standards compliant. I'm sort of stunned anyone reading HN needs to schooled in that.

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