Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Bizspark is great. But let me just give a generic reminder: Consider what you'll do after the three years if you get heavily invested.

If you are a Microsoft shop either way then it doesn't matter too much, but if you're making technological choices now, consider how well that will scale without free licenses (e.g. ASP.net/MVC, how much is Windows Serve licensing going to cost you? Visual Studio? Active Directory? MS SQL?).

This isn't an anti-Microsoft post, just a post to remind everyone to think about the future of your small business with technological choices. Bizspark is designed for you to get yourself into the Microsoft's way of doing things (which is good and bad, depending on your needs, etc).

I actually like Microsoft's stack, but realise it is expensive, too expensive for many small businesses.

View on HN

It is also $150 a month of cloud time which will run lots of other stacks including Linux VMs if you want to run your own thing. If you want to write .Net but mitigate the Windows TCO risk write software that runs on .Net Core and is therefore cross platform, use an ORM like Entity Framework to abstract away the database. You don't get the benefits of the extra bells and whistles but these days you can write .Net that will quite happily not be tied into a MS server stack, let alone what the landscape will be in 3 years time.

If you're very small and have some clever devops guys you can use Visual Studio Community to develop and deploy to Mono. You _really_ have to know what you're doing with Mono though, it can be a headache, hopefully the .NET on Linux stuff will fix that up.

Check out the license, for non-"enterprise" (where enterprise is >250 PCs, or >$1M in revenue) users, up to 5 users in your company can use it.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/mt171547.aspx

Isn't the Partner Network another way to get dev. softwares at a reasonable price if you meet the requirements? I always thought it was kind of the suggested path: bizspark => ms partner, but I may be wrong.

https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/us/Pages/index.aspx

You have to be a basic Microsoft Partner to be part of Bizspark.

Some higher tiers of the partnership program receive free software. But initially you'll be at "Network member" which doesn't provide any free stuff.

Silver and Gold tiers receive:

- Free support (20 and 50 hrs respectively, 15 and 20 incidents)

- Internal use licenses: 25 and 50 on-site respectively.

- MSDN: 5 or 10 seats.

However to get to Silver or Gold you need:

- Customer references: 3 or 5 (silver or gold).

- Business-focused competency assessment: 1 or 2.

- Revenue commitment (i.e. buy a certain number of Microsoft licenses)

- Microsoft certified staff: 1 or 2 minimum (that must be active, so renewed every few years).

The Silver and Gold partnership tiers are pointless for large business/corporations, and unreachable for startups/small businesses. They're really for mid level businesses that are Microsoft focused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com