The main reasons I can see for a startup not to go .NET/MS Stack.
1) It is maintained exclusively by 1 company, if MS decide to kill off part of the platform or let it stagnate and you have a huge base of code based on it you are going to be missing out on the cool new stuff the ruby/python etc guys are getting. In the event that MS went bankrupt or decided to totally change their business model (i.e focus on consumer products) you are essentially screwed.
Also if they decide to change how their tools work (even just change the GUI around) your pretty much forced to re-learn it, this happens less on unix.
2) Licensing costs, sure these may not be that significant but they are subject to change and however small they may be you are competing with free.
3) Familiarity, Allot of startups probably hire recent bright college grads. These guys will have used desktop windows at some point, but they are very likely to have also installed Linux/BSD on a spare computer at some point and setup apache etc on it by reading stuff on wikis/blogs even if just for kicks. How many of them are likely to have installed a Windows 08 server on their own computer and figured out how to set it all up properly by reading MCSE manuals? It's somewhat different from setting up Windows desktop. It's also pretty complicated, I once went on a 2 week course with work to learn how to do some things on Windows server, doing roughly the same things on Linux took about 2 hours to figure out (ok , the course was pretty slow paced so 2 weeks might not be fair).
4) It's windows, it has a reputation for security issues. While this may not be as common as it was , it still makes allot of people nervous when I talk about forwarding ports to a Windows box.
5) Lock in, once you are commmited to Windows stack there's not allot you can do to chop and change parts of your stack for other things, like for example use a different kernel or filesystem. On the other hand let's say your running Linux servers and decide to move to BSD (or apache to lighthttpd), most likely much less of a hassle.
To overcome these things they would need some serious selling points.
Other than backwards compatibility with older stuff is there really a good reason that MS needs to build it's own OS kernel etc?
If they announced tomorrow that the next version of Windows Server would run a BSD kernel but they would port .Net + Active Directory + Windows GUI and everything else over to it would anything really be lost?
1) It is maintained exclusively by 1 company, if MS decide to kill off part of the platform or let it stagnate and you have a huge base of code based on it you are going to be missing out on the cool new stuff the ruby/python etc guys are getting. In the event that MS went bankrupt or decided to totally change their business model (i.e focus on consumer products) you are essentially screwed.
Also if they decide to change how their tools work (even just change the GUI around) your pretty much forced to re-learn it, this happens less on unix.
2) Licensing costs, sure these may not be that significant but they are subject to change and however small they may be you are competing with free.
3) Familiarity, Allot of startups probably hire recent bright college grads. These guys will have used desktop windows at some point, but they are very likely to have also installed Linux/BSD on a spare computer at some point and setup apache etc on it by reading stuff on wikis/blogs even if just for kicks. How many of them are likely to have installed a Windows 08 server on their own computer and figured out how to set it all up properly by reading MCSE manuals? It's somewhat different from setting up Windows desktop. It's also pretty complicated, I once went on a 2 week course with work to learn how to do some things on Windows server, doing roughly the same things on Linux took about 2 hours to figure out (ok , the course was pretty slow paced so 2 weeks might not be fair).
4) It's windows, it has a reputation for security issues. While this may not be as common as it was , it still makes allot of people nervous when I talk about forwarding ports to a Windows box.
5) Lock in, once you are commmited to Windows stack there's not allot you can do to chop and change parts of your stack for other things, like for example use a different kernel or filesystem. On the other hand let's say your running Linux servers and decide to move to BSD (or apache to lighthttpd), most likely much less of a hassle.
To overcome these things they would need some serious selling points.
Other than backwards compatibility with older stuff is there really a good reason that MS needs to build it's own OS kernel etc?
If they announced tomorrow that the next version of Windows Server would run a BSD kernel but they would port .Net + Active Directory + Windows GUI and everything else over to it would anything really be lost?