
IT leaders trust Microsoft more than Google, 2-to-1 - Flemlord
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=3207
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rbanffy
That's a potentially deadly problem I call "management by managers".

One can also refer to Scott Adams' point-haired boss character for further
enlightenment.

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drhowarddrfine
You said what I was going to say and you're absolutely correct. This must be
the stupidest comment and opinion I've read in a long time:

The skeptical attitude toward Google was best summed up by Donna Trivison,
Director of IT for Ursuline College, who wrote, “There seems to be some
conventional wisdom that Google is the answer to what’s been wrong over the
years in the Microsoft universe. That kind of thinking may be dangerous. As
consumers of technology we need to keep each and every business partner honest
and working for us. Handing trust carte blanche over to Google because, as the
wisdom goes, they are good citizens, seems misguided to me. If I had to pick
one, it would probably be Microsoft because they have withstood the scrutiny
their misdeeds have landed them. Google remains, for the most part, untested.”

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maukdaddy
That attitude is so amazingly pervasive throughout all IT. The notion of only
buying something that is "tested" is due to most managers' risk aversion. They
are not willing to bet their jobs on some company or technology until x% of
their peers have already done it.

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bsgamble
You are totally right about the pervasive attitude throughout corporate IT
organizations. The only point I would question is the "..willing to lose their
jobs.." part. Most corporate IT orgs have their story so well prepared to
deflect blame in the case of failures that employees are rarely, if ever
terminated. Instead the business takes the failure on the chin and all of us
in technology have to deal with the reduction in credibility.

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rbanffy
There is a tendency the higher profile a failed project is, the highest the
chance to redefine success based on its results.

This stems from the pain of firing the high-level executive that signed the
check. The larger the check, the higher the executive is in the corporate
ladder and the more painful the firing, thus, the executive is never fired
because the project cannot fail.

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xcombinator
Hey, who you trust more?:

a)A program that is in your own servers - computers. b)A program that is on
others computers.

So difficult to understand why people trust A more than B. Whatever they
promise you, they can look at your data if they want, not so easy in A.

E.g The NSA have the option to see whatever they want in the USA, they have it
so easy to do industrial espionage against other countries(they did it with
airbus, with national security excuses).

Google can't say no to NSA. Microsoft either(they let them put backdoors in
their software), but is not so easy.

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Elepsis
What in the world makes you think Microsoft lets _anyone_ put backdoors into
their software?

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xcombinator
They need to send their network and security code to NSA for inspection, they
look at it and MODIFY, they don't know in some cases what does the
modification does.

It has been that way from 1995 days(I had family members working in MS at that
time).It's normal, they are a US company after all.

I'm too lazy for citation, just search by yourself, here you can look at the
"there are good contributions from NSA" probe:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/01...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/01/08/AR2007010801352.html)

You know, we "can be all terrorist" mentality, like the printers mark, they
need some way of accessing any computer just in case.

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jameskilton
So to summarize:

"Microsoft sucks, but I know their stuff, and I'm too afraid to change."

Also, 12 people, from companies of which I've heard of two (NAMICO and Lincoln
Financial) do not a comprehensive poll make.

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sunchild
And how many of these same IT managers route every last piece of corporate
email through Postini?

The hypocrisy and FUD in corporate IT is out of control.

Most IT managers today are survivors from the days when "IT" was basically a
blue-collar job - running cables, installing switches, and hiring other
companies to do all the application layer work. Their days are numbered, so
they cling to the glory days when desktop software made by Microsoft made
everything so difficult for end users that a huge in-house IT organization was
viewed as a necessary evil.

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scootklein
n = 12 ?

i'd love to see this poll done with startups: founders that were in diapers
when DOS was launched. also, for the 8 that voted microsoft, what do their
organizations as a whole vote toward?

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roc
All that just to say _"No-one ever got fired for buying IBM"_ ?

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rbanffy
I have one example of someone who was fired because he bought IBM

