Last week I went to the London Girl Geek Dinner 3rd birthday party and saw a few familiar faces and a many new ones. The highlight of the night for me wasn’t the speakers or even bumping in to my Irish based comrade Martha Rotter – it was chatting with a couple of start-ups and getting their candid feedback on why the weren’t using Microsoft products to run their businesses.

Both the guys I spoke with had built their web applications using Ruby and ran on Sun. The often cited reason I hear for start-ups not using Microsoft software is cost compared to LAMP. This wasn’t the reason these guys had – it was really down to these things:

1. Familiarity with using Sun and editors like vi at University meant that’s what they wanted to use the same stuff in business
2. Their experience with Windows on the desktop had clouded their view of it’s ability in the datacenter
3. They really didn’t think Microsoft played in the start-up arena and didn’t have much to offer

It just left me thinking WOW…we have a mountain to climb to meet change perceptions. It means lots of grassroots work, work with education and helping people understand our interoperability approach and stuff like Ruby running on IIS.  Our Port 25 site and blogs like Stephen McGibbon’s are now on my own feed list as I need to get closer to this stuff and have better answers for guys like the ones I met last week.

It’s going to be a long journey but we have some exciting announcements this year that I think will help and also my old chum Karl is working on this stuff in Redmond so we’re in safe hands :)