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No Passion

How come nobody is cursing or throwing things?

I participated in a throw down between Microsoft, UNIX (variety Solaris) and open source proponents (me) for a customer in DC last month. It was a very young crowd except for yours truly. Young and disturbingly nice.

The Microsofties politely made their points about the upgraded high availability features of Vista and their ability to operate in a five “9’s” environment. The Solaris dude talked about the blazing speed of Sun’s new processor. I spoke eloquently about the beauty of open source systems and how cheap they were.

It was all over in half a day. At the end, everyone shook hands and promised to keep in touch. I could have sworn I saw the Sun guy going off to lunch with the Softies (and the lion lay down with the lamb).

I was ticked off. There was no blood on the floor. No one raised their voice to contradict anyone else’s position. There was no passion. Normally I can be counted on to raise the temperature a bit. Everyone was so darn nice in front of the customer that the best I could muster was a few guffaws and some general throat clearing.

Seven years ago I was involved in a major rollout of a UNIX based application at a state government agency. The Microsoft crowd was so incensed that management had chosen a UNIX solution; they took one of the application vendor’s salespeople hostage and barricaded themselves in the server room. OK…they didn’t really do that, but they were very upset. So upset that they refused all attempts to implement the new application. Two years and many millions of dollars later the agency was forced to throw out the application and buy a Microsoft compatible product.

Now that was passion. And a waste of taxpayers money. I was on the UNIX team, so my dog lost that hunt. Still…I admired the MS team. They won. They won and they rubbed it in our face. They laughed at us in the cafeteria. How come nobody does that anymore? Are these twenty-something wanna-be gangsta hip-hop loving engineers just a bunch of wimps?


Posted by Matt Hamilton on September 13, 2007 05:07 PM | Share This Blog! |

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