Tech

http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.aspx

Is a very decent article on why Windows Vista has slipped a little bit and a theory (and perhaps apologetic?) for the schedule and culture of Microsoft.

My own take:  I’m about 10 years into my profession now and the world has changed greatly and continues to do so.  Knowledge expiration tends to go in about 2-3 year cycles for me where I step another generation away from the Knowledge I left college with.  Vista and what is coming this fall/spring will be another substancial shift from where I’m at now. 

This time around my world is all about diversity in platforms I support.  For me, Windows/Intel continues to dominate, but there have been some recent additions to the field.  Namely, Apple and Open Source Software.  Apple, for instance, has really stepped up in terms of small-scale server hardware.  Providing support for wintel frontends was the best thing that they ever did.

My other winner is OSS.  As you’ve been reading, we’re in the process of getting together a LAMP installation (Linux/apache/mysql/PHP) that is fairly complex but thanks to the growing ease of use of those technologies putting together a highly available, redundant, and powerful web farm is fairly straightforward.

The chief thing about these technologies is that simply work.  There aren’t 50 Million lines of code in them that count for 50 Million chances for a hacker to cause a buffer overrun.  I rarely reboot my Linux installations that I have and for the most part they are self-sustainable.  They just simply work. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not growing a tail and becoming a large scale reptile that is danger of being extinct because of a meteor coming in.  I think we as IT professionsals should embrace the new, but the broader question for me is what best does the job.  If the sole goal of your getting a car is to drive fast do you want to be a pimped out SUV or would you want to buy BMW Z8.  Although the SUV may get you there in comfort, the BMW does the job in a much more superior way. 

The problem with most IT people though is that we get emotionally attached to platforms and jihads occur if a Linux box is brought into a Windows shop (or the other way around). I was showing off our new SAN to some co-workers and one commented that he appreciated just how ‘open minded’ I was in purchasing an Apple SAN.  It wasn’t that I was brand loyal, it was this box did the job far better than the more expensive Dell solution.

Choices aren’t available all the time due to the environment you’re working in, but with the diversity of technology that exists if a choice is available one shouldn’t choose based on emotional attachment. 

My point is that if Microsoft isn’t careful the beast of burden that they created may have bolstered a growing market for solutions that want a simple job to get done effectively without having to commit to a lumbering giant.