How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups, and How It Can Do Better

Re:How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups, and How It... by sachinag on Monday May 11, 2009 @05:33PM (#604372)

I button holed (read: stood up and asked a question of) Dan'l Lewis, the big muckety-muck at Microsoft in charge of the program, about BizSpark. The question was: "we're a LAMP shop, what do we get out of BizSpark?" His answer: "we can help you move to Microsoft tools when you have scaling issues. That's what we did for MySpace."

More fail: http://www.sachinagarwal.com/microsoft-bizspark-is-a-joke

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Re:How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups, and How It... by snprbob86 on Monday May 11, 2009 @06:05PM (#604432)

What did you want him to say? They know how to scale IIS and Asp.net. If they are going to help you, that's what they are going to help you do. If you don't want to use that tech, then don't.

But the key point you seem to be missing is that not all startups are web apps. I agree that if you are a Lamp stack web app -- or most any web 2.0 startup -- Bizspark probably can't offer you much. But what if you write Windows desktop software?

There are entire business (some quite large) which build nothing but Office plugins. Never mind the wide range of vertical applications for businesses that almost exclusively run windows. Microsoft's ecosystems is huge and very capable of sustaining quite a few startups. These startups need Windows, Office, and Visual Studio licenses. Of course they will include IIS and Asp.net in their list of benefits. Besides, Asp.net really isn't all that bad of a choice if you just need a company homepage or some kind of low volume or limited access web service.

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Re:How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups, and How It... by endtime on Monday May 11, 2009 @05:58PM (#604420)

To be fair, what did you expect him to say? Your question might as well have been, "We don't use your products and have no interest in doing so. What can we get out of you offering your products for free?"

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Re:How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups, and How It... by sachinag on Monday May 11, 2009 @07:07PM (#604520)

Wrong - I absolutely have an interest in using any tool that would be helpful to my business. I was asking for help to identify how best to use the toolset that BizSpark provides.

My question can't possibly be the first time he's heard that; I was astonished that he didn't have a pat answer that was productive. When we have scaling issues, we'll have all the traction and revenue we'd need. BizSpark doesn't help us at that point.

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Re:How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups, and How It... by Julienco on Tuesday May 12, 2009 @12:18AM (#604861)

there are 12 000 startups in BizSpark. most of them are doing web facing software apps. do you think they are all wrong ?

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