A buddy of mine from Borland days, Ben Riga, is helping to drive the content for Microsoft's Mix '08 conference. He's looking for input on what would make Mix attractive to startups and venture capitalists. To be honest, I haven't seen a lot of startups using the Microsoft stack in recent years. I'm sure there are plenty, but it seems at least at first glance, there's far more innovation happening over on the LA A buddy of mine from Borland days, Ben Riga, is helping to drive the content for Microsoft’s Mix ’08 conference. He’s looking for input on what would make Mix attractive to startups and venture capitalists. To be honest, I haven’t seen a lot of startups using the Microsoft stack in recent years. I’m sure there are plenty, but it seems at least at first glance, there’s far more innovation happening over on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and with other emerging languages like Ruby on Rails, Scala, etc. Still there’s no reason that Windows as a platform couldn’t be part of this. Microsoft has developed partnerships with some of the open source vendors including Zend, MySQL, SugarCRM to make sure that these systems work well on Windows. So my advice to Microsoft is to really continue to be an open platform for at least the AMP part of LAMP and show that developers can use whatever mix of open and closed source that they want. Otherwise, the default assumption is that developers interested in Open Source should ignore the Windows platform completely, and I think that would be a mistake. We certainly see lots of developers downloading MySQL for Windows and taking advantage of the integration with Visual Studio. Windows is our #2 platform for MySQL. But the message from Microsoft continues to be somewhat mixed. Maybe the Mix conference should be clear on whether Windows is an open platform that supports open source technology or whether in Microsoft’s view it’s meant to be an “all Microsoft” closed platform. Let me know your thoughts on this. Better yet, let Ben know… Open Source