- Hardware is 100X cheaper
- Infrastructure software is free
- Access to Global Labor Markets
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing)changes everything
What's interesting to me is the infrastructure software component. It's almost uniformly the case that these start ups are running on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PERL,PHP) software stack instead of the Microsoft stack. At first I thought perhaps it was merely my bias that prevented me from finding them. Companies like Flikr, Jotspot, Blogger etc all uniformly have adapted the LAMP stack to launch their new products.
So I went in search of the web start ups that are using the MS stack. I started at Microsoft. It seemed to me that partnering with Microsoft is a good way to get a ton of publicity that a start up so desperately needs. Here's how I approached the problem. I assumed that Google is inifinitely better at searching Microsoft than MS is. Actually they about the same. I used the search term "startups" in a site restricted search. I came across this Business Startups at Microsoft. Since I am looking for startup success stories, I clicked on the Startup success link. Eventually I ended up here I suggest that you spend some time there. I have spent several hours there and it's apparent that Microsoft's venture arm is still quite busy and active, making Microsoft a good partner. It's also apparent that every single one of those start-ups are traditional venture plays (ie see a market, go after it.) Not a single start-up highlighted by Microsoft is truly innovative new service that change the way that people use the web. In part this is because those sorts of start-ups are quite rare, everyone want to make the next Flickr. Most of the start-ups on the Microsoft page are selling software to the Fortune 500, very often to improve some part of their Microsoft architecture.
I suspect that real reason that there is a relationship between the very best developers (those most likely to develop a world beater application) are developing on the LAMP stack. This crucial loss of the far right hand of the Bell curve for MS doesn't bode well for the MS stack. As has often been noted, programmers on the far right hand side of the bell are often 10 to 100 times more productive than programmers in the middle. With the loss of these free range developers, it will only continue to extend the ecosystem of open source software and the LAMP stack.
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