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Comment by djjose | Hacker News Reader

Not so sure that's the driver here. Many devs have bought into the iOS ecosystem. This certainly isn't cheap: macbooks, imacs, iphones, ipod touches, ipads. It's also a pretty deep dive to get into.

On the web side, I really think cost is the driving factor more than anything. As long as there's a free (open source) solution to MS's framework that is on par (we can argue either way which frameworks/platforms are better) there's little incentive for startups to go .NET. If a LAMP stack started costing as much as a .NET stack the landscape would be very different. .NET faces the problems going against the Java stack.

In the end, it's about the money. Which platform can I make more money on and does it more than pay for the costs to be on the platform? Right now on mobile it's iOS and on the web it's typically LAMP or lately a Ruby on Rails stack.

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"Not so sure that's the driver here. Many devs have bought into the iOS ecosystem. This certainly isn't cheap: macbooks, imacs, iphones, ipod touches, ipads. It's also a pretty deep dive to get into."

There's a pretty big difference here: lack of choice. If you want to deploy native apps to iOS, you literally have no choice but to get into that world. If you want to deploy web applications (as many startups, especially HN startups do) there are dozens of options to choose from aside from buying into a single vendor's full stack.

True. The point I was trying to get across is that lock-in doesn't necessarily stop devs or people from jumping in. The potential to save or make money is to me the more powerful driver.

Microsoft has tried time and time again (with their various .Net initiatives explicitly!) to lock the web into their platforms, because they saw back then (and are blinded by the fact now) that the web is the new platform and pretty soon nobody is going to need Windows anymore.

Just look at Silverlight. Who wants to install that on their Apple or Google device? Flash is bad enough. And yet it's what Microsoft wants you to use to make your ASP.Net app have fancy graphs. L-L-L-lock-in.

Even iOS and Android wouldn't be as powerful as they are had fully-interoperable webservices not come first (killer apps like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and Dropbox are webservices first, apps second. You can't compete with them by making an app first, they're platform agnostic.)

So yeah, given the chance Microsoft will try and make Windows 7 running IE accessing a Windows 2008 Server running a .Net app on IIS with a MS-SQL Enterprise backend the only option. It's a testament to the fierceness of the FOSS and LAMP communities that Microsoft is losing this battle (and the world is better off because of it.)

The first time I had to re-buy something because I had invested time in a project and could not do without a certain vendors product I looked for (and then used) a freely installable tool that offered the same functionality. I suspect all people of common sense do this. People do "vendor lock-in" as a last resort, and the reason people don't use the MS stack is because they never figured a out a way to stop piracy without stopping (or negatively effecting) honest production. That and not allowing their products to be used as independent pieces. IMHO.

When you buy apple related products to develop for their mobile platform you are buying the tool chain required to develop for that platform. This is very much different when compared to purchasing sofware for the servers for back end development and deployment. Its like you purchase the iOS toolchain(hardware and software) and sell the app to the user. The user purchases is own iPhone and runs that on it. You don't buy iPhones for the users do you?

As far as backend development is concerned. You have to buy the tool chain as well as the software(read OS, SQL Server, IIS etc etc) for the servers that your developed software runs on. Now the problem comes when you need scalability. Adding more servers to your stack means not just spending money on hardware but on the software stack as well.

So now it all boils down to buying real large and powerful servers since scaling out is not cheap. This has added risks like on issues like replication, back up etc etc.

No one wants to be caught up in this sort of a situation. Especially start ups.

>> Many devs have bought into the iOS ecosystem. This certainly isn't cheap: macbooks, imacs, iphones, ipod touches, ipads.

It is a mobile tool chain. You don't need to use Macs for servers... (And the cost of an iPad, iPhone and iPod touch isn't high. You will need a phone anyway. And iPad is the only real game in town for pads, so you'll probably buy one anyway.)

And then you'll develop for them using what?

A Mac Mini is really not that expensive. (Do I have to list the $100/year cost, too?)

The laptop I was already using for Rails development.

The notion that every dev getting into the iOS space was converting from Windows at an enormous upfront cost seems rather daft. OS X had a lot of dev traction before iOS existed.

I obviously don't have hard numbers on this but I can say from my own experience we purchased macs exclusively to build iOS apps for clients. We run a pretty lean shop so we viewed buying macs just for web dev a luxury item. We spent the money early-on on bigger monitors and beefy PCs for less than getting some MB Pros. However with iOS apps being something clients now want, we had to spend the money and of course buy the devices to test. The money spent upfront certainly wasn't trivial. But I admit we could be the anomaly; maybe we were the last shop on earth still coding on PCs. :)

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