Ruby on Rails has made a really important contribution to reducing the barriers for web software start-ups, and for this @DHH and the core Rails team deserve the highest accolades.
Rails is a main component of the technology stack behind many hot Web 2.0 companies, including 37 Signals and Twitter, so it’s hard to not get excited about using Rails to build a startup–unless you are a Windows user.
The mainstream Rails crowd is unabashedly Mac users, and I respect their preference. Rails IS available for Windows, but this is a totally different (and much more difficult) experience than in the Mac world. Rails development on a Mac is kewl; Rails development in the Windows world is not.
To my delighted surprise, Microsoft gets all this–the game-changing simplicity (and low costs) of the “Rails way” and the market opening on the Windows platform. They get it all the way, and they put their money where their mouth is via their BizSpark program.
BizSpark allows starving startups free access to all Microsoft products for three years, and they have fully embraced the MVC application architecture popularized by the Rails crowd.
If you are an aspiring start-up who would rather leverage your existing Windows machines than triple your hardware costs in order to effectively use the free Rails stack, you owe it yourself to check out BizSpark.
I am not normally a Microsoft cheerleader, but this is one really important area in whch they get it. Congrats to whomever in Redmond had the courage to show true leadership.
