Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive?

Microsoft's development products are not that good. I've used Visual Studio, and I found the interface so incredibly clunky that it was easier for me to mount a network drive to my Linux box, and use a real text editor, "vim", to modify the project XML directly to make changes. (And that is not a joke.)<p>And the set of downloads is irrelevant, because it shouldn't even be necessary. On Linux and Mac, most of what I need is already there; while I <i>do</i> download other packages from time to time, they're for good reasons (like getting a new version). The base Mac and Linux installations already have <i>python</i> and <i>perl</i> and <i>a real shell</i> and <i>a real terminal</i> and <i>an SSH client</i> and <i>a good web browser</i>, and the list goes on. The number of things Windows completely lacks out of the box is mind-boggling, given the size of Microsoft's budget. And remember, you have the privilege of downloading and installing it all <i>again</i> every 6 months when Windows' holes make your PC useless.<p>But it isn't even about the cost or quality for me. It doesn't take much of a history lesson to realize that the vast majority of Microsoft's wealth has come from questionable business practices; practices that resulted in "de facto standards" through which they gain even more undeserved business. At this point, they could have the best products imaginable (they sure don't), and they would still deserve no business.<p>The <i>entire computing industry</i> has been set back <i>at least a decade</i> due entirely to Microsoft (and a number of other IT-dependent industries have been harmed). Microsoft has destroyed entire companies through unfair means; Microsoft should receive no recognition whatsoever as a credible business, and should receive no new contracts. I know it's just wishful thinking now, but it's the absolute truth.

<i>Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is, by far, a vastly superior RDBMS than most anything I have seen from anyone, in every respect</i><p>I was willing to continue reading the article, up to the above line, at which point it became clear that there's no basis for anything said.

Eww. Among his arguments:<p>1. It's OK that the MS developer tools cost money, because there exists an IDE for Ruby, PHP, etc., that costs money. (No matter than Eclipse, NetBeans, etc., are free.)<p>2. It's OK that IIS/ASP.NET costs money whereas Apache/PHP doesn't, because ASP.NET is more sophisticated than PHP. (No matter that, e.g., Rails is also more sophisticated than PHP but is also free.)<p>3. You probably won't have to pay for Visual Studio, because typically your employer pays for it. (Apparently in Mr Davis's world costs don't count when they are paid by employers.)

SQL Server Express is so limited that you really can't use it in production, and I've never had a case where Postgresql or Mysql couldn't handle the load (with enough architecture tweaks).<p>And you still need IIS. You can get that with Windows 7 Ultimate, but that's $319.95 for the retail price. And you pretty much can't get away without buying the retail version. We have deployed 8 HTTP servers, 2 MySql servers, another server with Varnish, 2 servers with Memcached and one for logging ... for one of the applications we maintain. Of course, we're using virtualization with Xen. But if we were to use Windows 7 Ultimate, then we'd have to shell out ... 13 * 319 = 4147 USD<p>On such a quantity you can probably get a discount, but let's be honest ... 4147 USD is almost the price we payed on the hardware, and I wouldn't run anything else than Windows Server in production which is a lot more expensive.<p>And if you're developing on top of PHP, Rails, Django, Mysql, Postgresql ... why on earth would you want to use a Windows server?

This article was all over the map in terms of numbers. Here at Expat, we develop on the Microsoft stack whenever we have a choice in the matter, including for our own products such as Twiddla, Blogabond, Rootdown, S3stat, etc. and here's the breakdown of what we pay for what:<p>Tools: $399 total. For Everything MS makes, for every developer in the shop, once every 2 years. That's what it costs for an MSDN license through the EmpowerISV program.<p>Servers: ~$2000 per production box. That's Small Business Server, which comes with production licenses for SQL Server, Exchange Server, and pretty much all the backend stuff you could want.<p>And that's it.<p>Assuming we buy a new server every 2 years, that means we pay about $100/month for the privilege of developing on the MS stack. Put another way, that means that the MS stack need only gain us 20 minutes worth of productivity every month to pay for itself.<p>Like I said up top, we build on the MS stack whenever we have a choice in the matter. It's just a no-brainer.

<i>On the Microsoft stack side, everyone knows about Visual Studio. The licensing cost for the Team Suite is $10,939. LAMP developers just love to point that kind of thing out. But folks, the fact is, that price is not measurable as the equivalent of LAMP freeware. It’s for an enterprise shop that needs very advanced and sophisticated tools for performing every corporate software role in a software development lifecycle.</i><p>These arguments are walking tightrope of avoiding the obvious. Installing all of the Microsoft free tools will make the stack cheaper. But as soon as you want to do something even close to challenging you can bet you'd need support and a license for the real tools. Apparently it's the open source crowd that is subjecting the "market" to FUD?

Scaling horizontally is considerably more expensive on the MS stack, as the StackOverflow folks discovered recently ("discovered" is a poor word choice maybe). I distinctly remember a blog post or podcast where Jeff basically lays out the numbers and says that the software costs make scaling up more enticing than scaling out.

I don't trust a Windows server to provide reliable uptime. I have no other arguments that I wish to make.

Of all of Microsoft's technologies, I have considered SQL Server, because from what I've seen it is an extremely powerful database engine with really good BI tools. There are two reasons I don't use it though: 1) it would be prohibitively expensive (for me anyways) to use across dozens of nodes and 2) it means introducing Windows into my environment, which quickly becomes very expensive and a nuisance.

Yeah .. haha .. "The shell and all that fluff is a separate download" .. fluff :-)

Yes.

I know as a student, it's waaaay too expensive. I could eithter get 4 months of rent, or a legal copy of some microsoft software. Guess which one I chose?

<i>Windows can also execute all the Java and Ruby stuff that you see in </i>nix platforms.*<p>Really? Hit any Ruby mailing list and every second post is a Windows user complaining that something doesn't work. Not just obscure things either - DataMapper doesn't work on Windows, or didn't a few months ago. Capistrano, the "official" Rails deployment tool, is not supported on Windows. And good luck with any gem that requires compilation.<p>Not to mention you lose out on all the command line tools. You'll need to install cygwin, of course. At that point you may as well just stop trying to run unix on a Windows box and just, you know, run Unix.