Microsoft Offers Free Software to Web Startups

By James Niccolai

PAGE 2

The program is being launched worldwide, with events planned in the coming weeks in Scandinavia, the U.K., Germany and Russia, Lewin said. Launch events will take place in 30 countries over the next several months, he said.

ZocDoc had already decided to use Microsoft software before it joined the program, Ganju said. It's Web application has to synchronize with calendar software on healthcare providers' desktop PCs, which usually run Windows, and ZocDoc wanted to use the same software platform on the desktop and the server, he said.

"You can make desktop apps with Java, but they don't look as native and clean," Ganju said.

ZocDoc's investors include Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, but Ganju said he wasn't tempted by those companies' cloud services, nor by Microsoft's Azure. He prefers to work with a traditional Web hosting provider.

"I think the cloud thing is very promising, it's where things are going in the future, but I'd rather wait for it to mature for another year or so," he said. "I'm still a fan of software running on actual servers."

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