Starting a company is a lot of work… and expensive! Usually you gave up a steady income to go an do your own thing, and the expenses and costs can creep up very quickly.
For developers on Microsoft’s technologies, and in general for most start-up, it was always been hard to come up with the money for the MSDN Subscription that can be up to 6K a year. Company with competitive technologies which are open source, this is a major disadvantage for MS.
On top of this, if you developed your site on microsoft’s technologies, shared hosting was always much more expensive for licensing issues.
Well, it seems that MS has noticed they are loosing too many start ups and are doing something about it…
Ricardo Covo 