Just Say No to "Just Say No..."

I shouldn't be reading a book like Just Say No to Microsoft by Tony Bove from No Starch Press. Usually, No Starch does pretty well by me. Their Linux for normal users series (including Linux Made Easy and Linux for Non-Geeks) is informative and those books are well written and instructive. Their advanced books like TCP/IP Guide, Write Great Code and the soon-to-be-reviewed here Wicked Cool Java are all worthwhile reads.

"Just Say No...", however, is not in this class. And, for me, it's even worse because the entire manuscript is pretty much a rehash of the whose-operating-system-is-better argument, which I consider to be one of the bigger wastes of time in the geek world. We've all gotten fed up with Redmond and written a die-Redmond-die rant; but I never extended one of mine into a book nor tried to get people to pay $25 to read it.

To be fair, the book wasn't written for me or anyone in IT. It seems written mostly for folks who've already made the no-MS jump and are looking for justification. Mostly political at that. For those who haven't, Mr. Bove concentrates on single users, power users, and PC enthusiast-types.

He makes some effort to talk to business users, but he glosses over the same issue that all these arguments gloss over: Real life. Even if I'd read the book from a PC enthusiast angle and reviewed it on a site like Technology Filter, I'd still have panned it because it's all the easy, and in many ways pointless, anti-Microsoft fluff. All the insulated and largely acedemic nerd arguments that just don't fly in the real world.

Mr. Bove: Microsoft isn't number 1 because Bill Gates is sitting in a high-tech office lair, stroking a white cat and surrounded by sharks with freaking laser beams on their heads. Nor are you Austin Powers for jumping to the Mac. Microsoft is number 1 because vast numbers of third-party software applications still run only on Windows.

If you're running a real estate management company, for example, one of the best dedicated accounting packages for this vertical is Intuit's MRI. Which runs only on Windows. If you want MRI, you want Windows. End of story. You can talk yourself blue explaining how great Linux is when compared to Windows and the owner of this company will just keep looking at his watch. You're not talking about anything that makes a difference in his life. And there are hundreds of examples like this across all kinds of verticals.

If you're a home gaming enthusiast, you're in the same boat. Games don't look much different on OSX or Linux, nor do they really run better. There are simply far fewer games for these OSes, so Windows winds up number 1. Sad, wrong, whatever, but real. Blame Microsoft or blame the Linux programming culture which is only now coming out with games that even remotely compare to mainstream desktop OSes?

Mr. Bove ignores this issue. Instead he rehashes the same stuff that the Linux desktop guys have been talking up for years. They have everything Microsoft does and a little bit more: a fast OS that's also stable, a productivity suite that's also full-featured and entertainment apps and Web browsers that do everything their Windows counterparts do except better and more securely.

And if all you need in life is a single-user instance of OpenOffice, XMMS and Firefox, then more power to you. But that's not an argument that IT guys, business owners or even many enthusiasts want to hear anymore. To them, technology is a tool box; an OS is a hammer, an IT guy a construction worker. They don't want to sit and read 231 pages of why the IT guy shouldn't use a steel handled hammer, but a wood handled one. They want you to shut up, pick up the GD hammer, grab a nail and build them the house they've been waiting for.

Mr. Bove does comment on the growing success of open source. But he does it in such a one-sided tone, that the same FUD he blames Microsoft for winds up obscuring his own work. PowerPoint even partially at fault for the 2003 NASA shuttle crash? Are you kidding me? Don't do that. Scenarios on how Active Directory could be used to hose down a Microsoft network? Don't do that either.

The people who know PowerPoint, know that if there was a bad PowerPoint slide you blame the author not the program. (Especially if two pages later you're crowing about Impress, which was engineered to be a PowerPoint clone.) The folks who know AD also know LDAP which in one form or other is embedded in every enterprise Linux server distro and can be used for good or evil as can any directory if a black hat gets access.

You want to win the hearts and minds of the Microsoft set, give them clear examples. Show an MRI user, for example, that he can download a full open source ERP application today and start customizing to get the same feature set. Admit that not every open source app is as clean as commercial Windows-centric ones. Show him how to get around that, or pick out the best ones for concentration.

Show him how to customize open source code without making some bearded Penguin guru rich with fees that wind up costing more than MRI would have in the first place. Show him how to train his users so they don't freak out when they see a Unix file path. Show a Sharepoint user how to mirror that functionality with a standard Web server, XML and intranet concepts--without breaking the budget or freezing production for months while waiting for programmers.

None of this is easy, and none of it applies to every situation. Maybe make that point, too.

Something. Anything except 231 pages of "I hate Microsoft and you should, too."

Posted by Oliver Rist on December 8, 2005 03:01 PM