[eduardordm]

My current company uses extensively .NET and I have almost a decade of experience working with it at my last employer, where I was also responsible for choosing and buying such products.

In my last employer (government), we didn't choose .NET, microsoft won the contracts. In the last update when I still worked there, we spent 250k USD to update our programmers VS to 2010 + windows 7. (I wonder if they will now update again). SQL Server prices are similar to oracle's with similar features.

In my startup (not a startup anymore) I had to spend 40k just to get the environment needed for a project (involving telephony) the only reason we had to use .NET was because the hardware manufacturer only provided driver+tooling for windows and some components were exclusively for .NET. Because we mostly use linux and macs, we also had to buy windows licenses. In my country, a Windows 8 license cost almost 2x the minimum wage.

We happened to have a discussion if we should give up or not a specific product because of the microsoft taxation on our business. The only reason we decided to keep using .NET is the cheap labor and the lack of hardware suppliers willing to provide us drivers and tools for linux.

So yes, microsoft damages not only startups, but companies in general.

[orangethirty]

Would you say that Oracle, and IBM also damage companies?

[eduardordm]

I don't know much about IBM products but I'm a heavy Oracle DB user in the process of migrating to Postgres due to simple problems, cost not being one of them. In fact, you will see a lot of users still using very old Oracle versions and getting full support from oracle.

Oracle (DB product) is the wrong choice for most startups, I actually wrote a post about that some time ago: http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/1/this-is-why-y...

[orangethirty]

I'm curious as to what the cost threshold is (in your opinion). This is good data to understand. May you share more?