MSSQL used to have a massive advantage over it, but that has definitely dropped off in recent years.

I do take your point about non-high-tech startups tho.

Why is this? Well, basically, MS is great at developer education, or at least, it is better than anybody else. There is something of a clear system for development which suits the needs of SMEs, at least to some extent. The OSS platforms just don’t have that.

There are loads of developers who do Microsoft stuff, not so many who do the OSS stuff. At the end of the day, developers are better going with what they know.

Personally, if it was my company, I would go OSS or maybe OS-X, but I know that loads of people wouldn’t.

I would suspect a lot of the startups using MS SQL server aren’t particularly high-tech startups. A lot of people starting in the industry may have experience with MS SQL from MSCE and college (do any colleges use it?) and the cost of the license may be as nothing compared to the cost of getting someone who’s any good at an alternative database.

As I said over at Rob’s blog, I think SQL Server 2000 is a great product and in an enterprise environment I always pushed it to customers instead of Oracle which I found incredibly difficult to manage. We did have developers who always wanted to go the MySQL route but the reality is that 95% of Fortune 100 companies would not countenance it for mission critical apps. It doesn’t matter if they were right or wrong, they signed the cheques.

But now I’m in a startup, I can look at MySQL and Apache and then look at Flickr and del.icio.us and then read Cal Henderson’s book and know that I am making a good business decision to go that route.

Rather than vague generalities, I would love to see the pricing on a co-lo setup using Windows 2003 + SQL Server 2005 + IIS for a simple front-end/back-end two box solution and then look at the same for Fedora + MySQL + Apache.

I’d be perfectly happy to use MS technologies in what we are building but until they address the core pricing issue for early stage startups, I think they have a big problem. I don’t mean cheap or feature limited, I mean enterprise-level and free. Not in some sort of happy-clappy all software should be free sense but for solid long-term business and mindshare reasons.

Could they maybe start a partner programme where a start-up gets everything for free until they are cash-flow positive? Sure they’ll lose out on licensing fees but they’ll acquire thousands of more developers who will default to using MS technologies in every new project they encounter.

And for the successful ones, the upside for Microsoft is huge. I wonder how much MySpace are handing over each month? Imagine if MS had given a ton of free licences to YouTube in 2005? The second Google acquired them, they would have owed MS a pretty pot of money.

And to your further point about being concerned about our sustained engagement, I think you misunderstand the purpose and goals of the team I’m a part of (Developer and Platform Evangelism Group), and how we fit into the larger Irish subsidiary (where we have groups that perform deeper and longer-term engagement with our partners), and of course Microsoft as a whole.

However, Ben M, you are also correct, my role, and consequently what I was referrihng to in the comment of the previous post, is not just focused on the data tier. Being able to work more deeply with startups and ISVs across all the Microsoft developer and platform technologies is a major factor in why we are hiring new members of the team.

Back to databases: Here at Tech Ed we have seen both Oracle and SQL well represented on the conference floor, and as you point out, every crowd has varying stats to ‘prove’ their points. For those who are only comparing SQL against open source alternatives, keep in mind that there are actually quite a few database vendors who believe (with good reason IMHO) that they are adding value in many business scenarios - including startup scenarios.

I am very interested to hear your thoughts on why or why not you wouldn’t pay for a database. I would think that the data tier is perhaps where it’s most obvious that total cost of ownership, reliability, scalability, availability and (importantly) manageability are all critical.

Of course, on the other hand, can think of LOTS of projects I wouldn’t pay for a database for — but for those, I use SQL Server Express, since I love its tight integration with Visual Studio Express, and the fact I could always scale up to full SQL if any of my ideas were (miraculously) to catch on…

If you consider how foolish the statement is: ‘We can hardly keep up with the demand’… they are just selling licenses! How hard is that?

Our group at Microsoft Ireland can, quite literally, not adequately keep up with the demand we get from local startups

…doesn’t mean that more people are using MySQL over MSSQL. In fact from that qualitative information alone you can’t even derive whether MSSQL has significant traction in the market place.

Clearly there are many other factors at play here - such as how many employees the MS DB Ireland group have, how many customers their support, which business sectors, etc.

Also go to any trade show and you’ll see competing vendors all claim they have the leading product - with varying stats to ‘proove’ it.

If you want to test your hypothesis why not carry out a vote or something on your blog instead?

management made a (non-technical/political) decision last year to switch platforms to .NET/MS. We’ve probably spent, in the last 12 months, somewhere around $300-500k (if not more) in hardware/licensing/support. we have weekly issues with sharepoint, had to retrofit large amounts of ldap code to talk to AD because of subtle microsoft incompatibilties, have to maintain 2 different development frameworks (.NET 1.0 because sharepoint doesnt support .NET 2.0), etc. its essentially a nightmare.

morale of the story: we’re currently switching platforms back to OSS and Java.

I think the conversation has extended in scope beyond Tom’s original point where he was really talking about implementation technologies for web application startups.

I’m very pro Open Source and our main server is a Fedora box, I have Kubuntu on an old laptop but I run XP on my desktop and main laptop along with Office. I tried the pure Openoffice route (and still do a bit for internal docs) but as long as you are exchanging documents with others, the lack of 100% compatibility will always be a problem. I got tired of constantly reformatting docs and spreadsheets due to the small glitches. PDF only works in a read-only sharing scenario.

Despite building our Web App using LAMP, I’ll be happily buying Vista when it comes out, it looks gorgeous and I was impressed with the RC running on VMWare.

Recent release of Ubuntu and Fedora have been riddled with desktop usability bugs which are not getting fixed from release to release. I’m very close to putting Win2k back on the old laptop due to the Kubuntu problems and I generally only use Fedora for server functionality.

Now these are very good deals where you get a whole pack of Microsoft business applications (ActionPack) or ISV applications (Empower) at a knock down price (around 350 euro). We are an ActionPack subscriber but we develop in Python and our database in Postgres.

I suspect if you scratched the surface of a lot of ISVs you’d find the same story. The economics are inescapable especially if you conside that the minute you move to web hosting the database of choice is MySQL.

And of course its free, works with Ruby, Rails, Python, Java, PHP etc. etc. with zero effort on the developers part.

Assume for a minute you start up a new company and it reasonably IT related. Let’s say oh I don’t know emmmmmmm a data centre.

And your going to have staff. So your initial reaction as a reasonably techie type person is open source the lot. Management software, monitoring software, network analysis software, open office for everyone running on some form of Linux.

Then bit by bit your staff increases. Your receptionist/typist can ALT key her way through MS Word with her eyes closed but now she’s back to basics figuring out how to tabulate a page.

Meanwhile your data centre has grown, supporting the open source free network tools is getting time consuming, it’d be nice to be able to ring someone and say “Get this sorted out or else!�

Your list of clients has grown exponentially and you need to automate as many processes as possible but you discover that automating your apps is a brave new world because only a handful of people in the world have used this app in anger.

Your techies are using a variety of email/Scheduling clients (checkout Google’s internal mail client policy to see this taken to madness) and scheduling a meeting automatically is almost impossible.

In the midst of this you now have more non techy gurus working for you than gurus. Slowly but surely the cost of maintaining the various free software applications far exceeds the purchase cost.

As your company has expanded more and more of the decisions on software purchases aren’t being made by you but managers. Managers who wonder what happens if I go down the route of a new application that is free but may not work/be supported/Used by anyone else in the world. On the other hand if they purchase application B that is used worldwide/supported/known to work (Kind of) which option do you think will give the manager the most job security?

And now you are staring down the barrel of migrating data, apps and users to commercial software. Fun fun fun.

Taking Microsoft Office, many businesses will be running custom Access applications, VBA scripts, etc. In those cases, it may prove more expensive in the short- to medium-term to move away from MS Office, rather than staying with it. Microsoft are not exactly forcing you to upgrade to a newer version of Office either - Office 97 works fine on Windows 98, 2000, and XP.

There’s also the simple truth that while free desktops such as Gnome might be getting better, Windows is still superior at this time (at least for general use).

Is anyone here suggesting free/open solutions even factoring the cost of re-training in? A typical business will consist of more than just the bearded gnomes…