Okay…I’ll Play Ball

December 3, 2007

So I hear the hip new thing to do these days is collect the sum total of your daily experiences, convert them to text, and apply them liberally to the Internet. So, in accordance with whatever mandate it is that requires me to be “cool”, I’ll go along with this. So I suppose the logical starting point is to rebut an article posted on Tom’s LSC Tech Blag about Windows and its usefulness to an organization requiring mission-critical uptime.

Now, typically I don’t like getting into these arguments. I think the whole Operating System 1 vs. Total Solution 2 debate is childish and immature. A competent IT department, much like any competent scientist, must always be open to many possibilities. The reason for this is simple: by not recognizing the merits of diversity in systems, you limit yourself to a certain mindset. Now, I have for years struggled with the question of UNIX vs. Windows. I deployed one end-to-end and ran with it for months, years. Then I would switch to another. I was thinking in very black and white terms. I would get caught up on the Microsoft bandwagon and go full throttle into fail town, then out of resentment and disgust for myself I would switch entirely over to Linux/UNIX. It was frustrating at times, because I was torn.

Then I discovered something new. Something fresh. I began realizing that my frustration was rooted in the inherent difficulties in a single-vendor setup. I liked certain things about both systems, but other things were deal breakers. I discovered that I could, in fact, mix and match. Now, to any seasoned IT professional, this sounds like child’s play. It’s obvious. Not withstanding the liability benefits to diversification, it made sense. Linux is extremely good at being reliable, at serving mass amounts of data and receiving just the same. It was born from and modeled after hardened systems that at the time (c. 1991) had been doing exactly this for two decades. The ideas were polished, refined. It just wasn’t terribly good to look at, nor to work with.

Then Windows enters the mix. Windows is a cruel mistress no matter how you cut it. But working with it and understanding it is an imperative. The business , gaming, and home media worlds have all adopted Windows products as the de facto way of doing things. To quote Stephen Colbert, “The market has spoken.” And frankly, some of these decisions aren’t the wrong ones. No Linux, UNIX, BSD, or BeOS desktop can even come close to properly supporting 3D gaming, a lucrative multi-billion dollar industry not to be taken lightly. As for the business front, Microsoft Office is just better. It set the standard for how we do things in business communication (and no, now is not the time for the WordPerfect argument). It’s widely supported, universally recognizable, and for the most part, it “just works”…and that is an important point.

So, while uptime and reliability are huge concerns, there is a trade-off. If you only have one option because somebody else decided that that was a good idea, then you are stuck. So deal with it, explore it, learn and understand it and lose the assumptions. Quite often a bad idea has a way of covering up a few ideas that actually aren’t that bad.

Filed under: --articles |