Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
piehead.com
Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
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Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#2The real answer is just as much about our industry’s culture as it is about technology.
No, it's entirely about our industry's culture. Which is a shame. It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM. It never will though, thanks to Microsoft's boneheaded choices and the blog posts like 'Why I don't hire .Net developers'.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#3The real answer is just as much about our industry’s culture as it is about technology. No, it's entirely about our industry's culture. Which is a shame. It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM. It never will though, thanks to Microsoft's boneheaded choices and the blog posts like 'Why I don't hire .Net developers'.
I completely agree. Especially with tools like Mono that allow you to run .NET code on Linux/Mac OS X.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#4As much as we like to think of ourselves as cold and calculated, able to cut through emotions when making decisions, more often than not we're just like everybody else.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#5Another answer is it's because most startups are consumer web-focused and MS traditionally hasn't been.
ASP.NET was traditionally an enterprise framework. Which got long in the tooth. ASP.NET MVC is quite good, but probably just caught up with the leading FOSS with MVC 3. Give it a year. And in general people aren't doing startups for desktops anymore, although they're still huge in the enterprise, which is why .NET is bigger in the enterprise than for startups.
The other big space for startups is mobile, but MS isn't big here at the moment. Why are startups using Cocoa now? Well because iOS is huge. If WP7 becomes huge, guess what happens? C# becomes a hot language for startups.
The author of the referenced blog (not the Piehead one) clearly doesn't understand that domains tend to dominate language. And further doesn't seem to understand that you try to pick the best tool for the job. A manager begrudging you for selecting the best tool for the job is not someone you'd want to work for.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#6There is a strong perception (whether accurate or not--and I honestly don't know the answer) that it's the same old story with Microsoft: if you go the .NET route, you've gotta buy into the entire Microsoft ecosystem. It's not just .NET that you're choosing; you're also choosing Windows servers, IIS, Visual Studio, etc.
If that perception is accurate, it's entirely reasonable to say, "Despite liking a lot of what .NET has to offer, we don't want to buy into one specific company's ecosystem that deeply."
If that perception is inaccurate, then there should be some serious marketing around changing that perception (and not just from MS--but more like this type of grass-roots post).
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#7I'm using rails for my company but ruby is definitely not my preferred language. Blocks/Procs/Lambdas (why are there three almost identical constructs?) definitely don't compare to function application / currying. I'd much rather write in F# but I'm worried about all the nice to haves that come with the rails stack, like capistrano or the plugins to serve/upload your assets to S3. (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass)
I definitely foresee at some point switching to ASP.NET in a similar manner as twitter is moving over to the JVM / Scala, but rails still has a lot of legs in it for us.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#8The real answer is just as much about our industry’s culture as it is about technology. No, it's entirely about our industry's culture. Which is a shame. It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM. It never will though, thanks to Microsoft's boneheaded choices and the blog posts like 'Why I don't hire .Net developers'.
I completely agree. Especially with tools like Mono that allow you to run .NET code on Linux/Mac OS X.
Mono lets you run some .NET code on Linux/Mac OS X. Some of my favourite pieces of Microsoft technology are missing or too broken to use - for example WPF is an excellent tool for building desktop applications but it doesn't work on Mono, F# sort of works until you try doing recursion with abstract data types.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#9plentyoffish.com the worlds largest dating site is based on M$ tech
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#10Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup.
We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues seem to be associated with ASP.Net and claiming to be a web developer without understanding how the web actually works. Many of them are so into just using the tools that they never bother to learn Javascript and instead insist on doing Postbacks for everything.
I feel that we're starting to see a new side of Microsoft when it comes to the web and startups.
Things like ASP.Net MVC, Azure and BizSpark give me hope.