
Coding Horror: Giving Up on Microsoft - mattjaynes
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000845.html
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jwecker
The clincher for me was years ago when our ISP moved physical locations. They
had a bunch of geeks including my friend Joey go over and help move things,
especially all of the co-lo servers. Joey told me later that as they loaded
the vans the nix guys grabbed their servers, jumped into the vans and crammed
them in there as best they could, sometimes plopping them on the ground. The
windows geeks who showed up gently disconnected each machine and very, very
gently and carefully carried them to the vans or transported them to the new
location in their own vehicles. They treated their servers like glass. And
then when everyone arrived and the ISP guys said "OK, who can help crimp
cat-5s?" all the nix guys said sure and all the windows guys looked around for
a bit and said "uh, we're not certified to do network stuff" and left.

It's funny- it's completely a mental thing, but Joey and I were sure they
treated those servers like glass because, as we had both experienced in former
lives, the OS acted like it was made of glass. Any jarring and who knows what
would happen to the registry or filesystem. That and the fact that they had so
much money tied up in those servers.

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Goladus
I agree with his point, sort of, but I don't think the dichotomy is really
that bad. I think a lot of unix and open source people are a bit fanatically
anti-microsoft, but the reality is most developers simply don't have the time
to become an expert in both worlds.

I'm trying to move away from microsoft for a fairly simple economic reason:
licensing is is a pain in the ass. Auditing software compliance is a legal
hassle that eats time and money. It's discouraging make-work.

