The throwaway comment is this: who cares about backends? Go make something people want. Every second you spend chatting tech is wasting your time. Make something people want
even if you have to do it with a pencil and paper. Worry about the tech when you've figured out step one. 99% of startups don't do this.
So for all of the armchair startup warriors out there, the guys eager to hear if Facebook is really running MongoDB or what their sharding plan looks like, let's look at the tech.
I'm a MS hound from way back. I made a bet -- a very good one -- back in the 90s that MS was going to own the PC market. And it did. And life was good. Microsoft sold tools and apps, I came in and programmed using those tools and apps. Many times I came in after the local yokels had already screwed things up. This meant a higher bill rate. Life was nice.
But I started noticing something: there was a certain arrogant-jerk-inbred-echo-chamber feeling to the MS community. MS pimped tools to the developers. Developers ate it up. MS pimped new servers to their MVPs. The MVPs sold them to corporations, consultants came in and collected. It was all fine and dandy, but over time there just got to be more and more tools and apps, and more and more servers and experts. Any small reasonable thing you'd like to do, like set up an email server, involved books, certifications, special servers, learning the acquisition history of all these small companies, and so on. It was ludicrous that any one person could be an expert enough to maintain the small set of tools that most folks would need. Microsoft was adding complexity -- unneeded complexity -- into everything it touched.
More troubling, once I started learning more about startups, I saw developers obsess over new Microsoft tools or third-party components instead of making things people wanted. Microsoft's interests was in creating and maintaining this ecosystem of selling servers and tools, not in helping people make things other people want. So I'd see these projects that were supposed to be solving a simple problem. They'd use all kinds of fat, bloated, feature-laden junk strung together in a huge pile of tech. Then somebody would start down the "happy path" of making a "hello world " app work. Very soon, however, developers ventured off the happy path, and then they had to learn javascript, html, SMTP, SQL, and so on.
So development consisted of salivating over new stuff, eagerly installing it, and then wandering around in the weeds trying to hook all the pieces together. And oh, by the way, the user was supposed to like it. But, let's face it, screw the user. We're here for the tech, right?
I still love the CLR and several other things Microsoft has created. But I'm not part of the ecosystem any more, and I won't spend any time at all learning whatever new version of Silverlight they'll have out next year. I'll also stick to my command line and bash, thank you very much. I've been burned too many times, and I've seen too many development teams destroy their productivity by getting lost in the Microsoft ecosystem.