Accelerator for Startups

A Startup Accelerator program provides promising new companies preferred access to technical and marketing resources from Microsoft. The program is designed to assist small companies that are building new applications or services on Microsoft platforms, and leverages Microsoft’s resources to give its partners an edge over competitive platforms and businesses. The Startup Accelerator differs from Microsoft’s Empower program, which has also seen some recent changes, in that participation in the Accelerator program is selective and it has no defined end date.

Focusing on Startups

In recent years, many new software companies have focused less on the Windows desktop and more on development of Web-based applications. They could use Microsoft development tools and develop on Microsoft platforms, such as Windows Server and SQL Server, but a high proportion of these companies use open source tools and platforms, such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python, known collectively as LAMP.

Companies building on these platforms tend to rely on free public support communities, such as newsgroups, blogs, or SourceForge, rather than on software vendor support. In spite of their reliance on free tools, free platform software, free support, and the need to contribute some or all of their software back to the open source community, many of these companies have found ways to generate revenue (typically through supporting the products they create) and attract venture capital, and some have been acquired for large sums of money—for instance, in Jan. 2008, Sun Microsystems acquired open source database company MySQL for US$1 billion.