Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?
<i>&gt;What are you thoughts as to why .NET hasn&#x27;t taken off at startups?</i><p>To echo what others said...<p>A lot of hot startups are founded by young college kids.  They <i>don&#x27;t have money</i> for expensive Visual Studio licenses to program in C# and .NET world.  In contrast, the alternative dev tools like Java, Ruby, PHP were free.  In college classes, they would have played around with free software instead of Microsoft.<p>Microsoft charged money in <i>multiple areas</i> of the stack:  the compiler (VS) cost money, the database (MS SQL Server) cost money, and the operating system (Windows licenses) cost money.  In contrast, PHP+MySql+Linux was $0.<p>Microsoft later tried to reverse the loss of mindshare with promotional programs such as <i>DreamSpark</i> and <i>BizSpark</i>[0]. That&#x27;s where a small business could get Microsoft dev tools for free for a limited time.  However, those enticements really didn&#x27;t change a lot of minds because founders knew that once the startup had revenue a year later, they&#x27;d have to pay a &quot;Microsoft tax&quot;.<p>Yes, MS later radically changed strategy by making their tools open source and more compatible on Linux.  However, it was too late because the <i>culture</i> of startups avoiding MS technology was already deeply ingrained.  The StackOverflow site would be one of the few high-profile startups that bought into the Microsoft tech stack.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=microsoft+dreamspark+bizspark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=microsoft+dreamspark+bizspar...</a>