Monday, November 13, 2006

Nobody ever got fired for buying...Microsoft??

Like Yogi Berra said, sometimes “it's like deja vu all over again”.

I guess I’ve been at this long enough to remember back to the 1980's when, in corporate IT, we tended to look for the IBM solution first, regardless of what other options there might be, and often overlooked the fact that the IBM option really sucked, as long as it had the illusion of being consistent with our other IBM software.

It seems to me that Microsoft has now assumed this role in corporate IT, with their products being the “safe” choice (remember the old expression “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”?). The hard part for myself is grappling with the default=Microsoft mentality. It seems increasingly common to make uninformed platform and product decisions that default to the “safe” choice.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that Microsoft is capable of producing innovative software when they are pushed. Things like C# 2.0 and the XBox 360 are examples of products that Microsoft is capable of producing when the chips are down and they are behind the competition, and I'm a big fan of those innovative products. Microsoft earned their current position in IT by coming from behind and delivering more value than the competition – they just don't have a great track record of innovation once they are in front.

It's just that a lot of people in IT are falling into the same trap as the IBM fans back in the day - “If it's good enough for Microsoft to release it must be good enough for us.”.

A lot of organizations are driving their businesses forward using alternative platforms. I listened to a Paul Graham talk a while back about open source and blogging. He's quite prolific with one-liners but my favorite one was "At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't".

What should we be doing? Challenge assumptions and herd thinking, focus on best of breed, identify where the value in a product comes from and use that to drive our selections. It's OK to use Microsoft products - heck, practically everyone has to – just make sure you're not using it just “because it came from Microsoft”. There are a lot of smart, pragmatic people at Microsoft – look beyond the product marketing and get them to help you figure out if a given solution delivers the value you need.

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