On Microsoft Bashing

for RuBoard

I'm fully expecting the Microsoft bashing to begin in earnest as Microsoft's competitors begin to learn more about .NET. They'll likely be worriedvery worriedthat this could be another home run for Microsoft, and rightfully so. I think it will be. .NET is going to change the way that people build software. It will revolutionize Web development the same way that Visual Basic revolutionized Windows development.

People who fear or compete with Microsoft are not going to like this. I expect the propaganda machine to kick into high gear once .NET is released. There will be a certain crowd (hopefully the minority) who will eschew the benefits of .NET simply because it comes from Microsoft. They'll never give the technology itself a fair hearing. They'd prefer just about anything over a Microsoft product, particularly enterprise software like .NET.

To me, shunning technology simply because it comes from Microsoft is like going to France and refusing to learn or speak French because you don't care for the French. Microsoft technologies are the lingua franca of the computing world. Refusing fluency in them only hurts us as developers; it doesn't affect them at all. None of us is big enough to impact their bottom line, regardless of what we might like to think.

People who know me know that I'm no one's lackey and that I've crossed swords with Microsoft more than once. I do not agree with everything they do, nor do I think their products are always the best of breed. It depends on the productI use what works. That's why I use SQL Server, and that's why I've embraced .NET.

When I hear of developers rejecting technology solely because it's produced by Microsoft, I envision the tiny chicken hawk going after the rooster in the Warner Brothers cartoons. It's silly and is doomed to failure. How do I know? Because it's been tried before, over and over, and it has failed miserably each and every time. Just ask WordPerfect. Or Novell. Or Lotus. The road is lined with companies who got into a shoving match with Microsoft rather than focusing on giving customers what they wanted when they wanted it.

I think developers should choose technology based on its suitability to their work. Certainly, we can't be shortsighted and pick technologies that are here today and gone tomorrow or that don't play well with others. Nor can we follow every fad that comes along. However, allowing an anti-Microsoft bias to cause us to disregard whatever innovations they may come up with simply because we don't like them is foolhardy. It's counterproductive and bad for us as well as the industry. If we follow this fatuous course long enough, we'll soon find ourselves out-engineered and out-competed in the grand contest to win and retain customers. It's a tech-eat-tech world out there, and only the fittest technologies survive. Sometimes they happen to come from Microsoft.

for RuBoard


The Guru[ap]s Guide to SQL Server[tm] Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML
The Guru[ap]s Guide to SQL Server[tm] Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML
ISBN: 201700468
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 223

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