I am planning a few posts over the next week and thought it important to disclose my personal views on Microsoft.
I began my career as a network admin, working with both NT and Linux servers. When comparing those technologies, I definitely liked the Linux servers for their stability and security. It wasn’t even a close competition. Later an opportunity arose to manage some SQL 6.5/7.0 servers and I took it, because the position was a huge step forward in my career, and I was lucky to even be offered it at all with a complete lack of experience (thank you tech bubble of 1999). I began to work with Microsoft products more because of the job and not because of my preference.
Then at the end of 2001, I wanted to make yet another career change and become a developer. I looked at two platforms, Java and .NET. I took a chance and chose .NET, and it was really based off of some rather simplistic reasons, configuration and deployment (there were some other things as well, performance numbers I had seen, security features at the CLR level, etc.). I learned while a DBA that developing applications is very similar to relationships. Everything is fun and new in the beginning, but towards the end, it becomes boring and monotonous. Just as I don’t want to prolong an ending relationship 1 day longer than absolutely necessary, the same applies to a project. Stability was not a major consideration, as it would be the network admins who would be responsible for this. I wanted to like my job. I wanted to like going in to work. Life is too short to not like what you do for a living.
At the time, it was definitely a risk, choosing a new platform by a company that had failed in the past to satisfy my personal requirements for delivering a quality product. Looking back today, I am happy to have made the choice that I did.
When I talk to others in the security world or Java developers for that matter, most of them work and live in the open source community. What I have found is that if you were to compare the user base of these two communities, you would find a higher percentage of them in the open source world to be bigots. Now, there are bigots in the Microsoft user base as well, and they are usually more diluted in their beliefs and do not give the open source community any consideration whatsoever. The problem with having preconceived notions towards a product is that your evaluation of the technology will not be accurate. There are plenty of benefits to open source software as there are to Microsoft software.
It’s always important to keep our beliefs grounded in facts. Whether you agree with my position or not, just know I respect yours. After all, the greatest benefit comes to all of us in the form of competition. Without competition, everyone suffers.