The Biz versus the n00b

So this is the post where I consider the outside, long-shot, limit as x goes to infinity possibility that I may have made a mistake in a previous post.

Waffle-y enough for you?

In the possibly wrong post, I wondered where Microsoft's BizSpark program was going, based on the downsizing of one of their main guys, Don Dodge. We put the post on the blog, Tweeted it on the Scimatic account, and moved on to other things. It's the internet; we don't have time for things like "editing," "fact-checking," or "sober reflection." Awfully noobish of me.

But the great thing about the internet is that someone might actually notice a scientific startup far from Redmond. And that person was Julien Codorniou, who is a manager for BizSpark. He said that only 90% of my post was wrong.

Man, I haven't got those kind of marks since I took General Relativity from Bob Wald.

Julien pointed me in the direction of the @bizspark twitter account and their web portal. From there I learned about all the startups that they are helping, such as Graphic.ly, Xobni and BumpTop. I suspect giving the tools to startups helps Microsoft in their goal to reclaim some of the “cool” factor for the Windows platform. Even though Microsoft writes a ton of applications, they can’t write it all, and I think they want to be able to point to startups as an indicator of the health of Windows outside of just Office for businesses.

We are moving through the gears of the BizSpark right now. The first step is tooling; we used the tools provided by Microsoft (Visual Studio and Expression Blend, mostly) to develop Samples, and we could not have got it done as quickly as we did without those tools. We are investigating Azure for our next stealth project and getting companies up and running on Azure is one of the explicit goals of BizSpark.

The second step will be to capitalize on business side of BizSpark to market and sell Samples. Microsoft is really, really good at selling software. We need to be good at that, too. I'm hoping BizSpark will help us with that goal.

So, was I wrong? Is Microsoft behind BizSpark, working hard with and for startups? Well, they certainly helped us with our first steps. The tooling support is excellent. I hope they can help us with our next steps. I will let you know about our experiences.