Shrug, your costs might be different, but 13k per developer per year is hardly a pittance compared to my salary. I'd much rather have 13k in my pocket or in awesome stuff like monitors, desk, keyboard, etc.

In what world are you paying 13k per developer for year to use Microsoft products? Top of the line MSDN sub is like ~3k, and we get good desks and monitors and keyboards and computers too. Most places don't even buy MSDN, I do fine with a <1k in software to develop on .NET.

I got that price right off their site, top line Ultimate (only slightly less feature rich then Intellij IDEA) clocks in roughly $12500 more than IDEA.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/how-to-buy-vs

Then most drop another couple hundred to make it actually have some of the cool Intellij IDEA features by adding in Resharper. I'm not trying to hate, I use VS at work, just I can see why it's not a popular startup ecosystem.

I don't know how that price is arrived at but it's totally not realistic. I would expect to spend ~1.5K on VS2013 Professional plus associated dev. tools (R#, dotTrace etc).

Just yesterday morning (oh the timing) I shook my fists in rage after discovering the long awaited Fakes system for mocking static functions is only available in the Ultimate edition. An actual language feature, restricted to the 13k edition. Shrug, I had that in php 5 years ago...

What I don't get is: if people aren't even buying the top line IDE to use all its features, and are just buying the crappy subset IDEs, why use .NET at all? Where's the value proposition over Java/Scala? It runs on fewer architectures, the language is only mildly better than Java and certainly not better than Scala, and the long promoted IDE has less features and is exorbitantly overpriced. I just don't get it. Is it just inertia at this point? The question in my mind isn't: "why are so few startups using it?" It's "why is anyone still picking that as their business's main stack?"

I know my team is currently locked in to agreements with other companies who require it (naturally). So when a new customer wants our stuff, they have to handle it. Is that the main reason? Everyone using it is in a circle of dependence?

Oh I forgot to mention, the functionality of Fakes used to be free, but in the new iteration it no longer is, so they can squeeze a few more 13k editions.