Updating an old maxim . . .

No manager ever got fired for choosing IBM; what about Microsoft?

by Conrad Weisert
August 23, 2005
© 2005 Information Disciplines, Inc.

Playing it safe in 1970

A generation ago conventional wisdom said that
No one ever gets fired for choosing IBM.

IBM was the safe choice in mainframe computers and peripheral devices. That is:

If you installed pure IBM computer configurations and some disaster occurred, that was just the nature of the risks in computing technology. People might grumble, but the incident would eventually be forgotten.
On the other hand if you tried to save some money for your company by installing a mixed-vendor configuration and some disaster occurred, your boss and your users would be irate that you had recklessly risked the company's welfare on unproven equipment. Your job might be in jeopardy.

Does a similar situation apply today to Microsoft products? Perhaps, but for quite different and surprising reasons.

Playing it safe in 2005

News reports last week told us that the so-caled "Zotob worm" malicious program had infected computer networks and disrupted mainsream operations at The New York Times, American Broadcasting Company, Chrysler, General Motors, Cable News Network, Caterpillar, American Express, Boeing, and other large organizations around the world. Zotob was facilitated, we we told, by a "vulnerability" (a euphemism for what we used to call a bug) in Microsoft's Windows 2000^® operating system, for which the vendor was making available an emergency "patch". Organizations and individuals using Windows 2000 were urged to download and apply the patch immediately.

Few people were surprised by these reports.

Why not? Because reports of malicious virus programs infecting vulnerabilities in Microsoft software have become routine, along with advice on applying the vendor's emergency patches. That's hardly news any more.

A reasonable observer might wonder about an I.T. manager who deliberately and repeatedly chooses products tainted by such history. But we're not hearing about such reasonable observers in organizations. The conventional wisdom of 1970 seems to have been updated to
No one ever gets fired for choosing Microsoft.

It's not as if we had no alternatives. Server systems, desktop systems, and productivity tools of high quality and easy manageability are available these days from multiple vendors. Furthermore, many modern applications based on Java, Oracle, or other platform independent technologies are easy and inexpensive to move. So why do I.T. managers continue to favor Microsoft products?

Because they're there. Whenever I've inquired of a client why they're still using, say, Internet Explorer instead of Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari the usual answer is that it came bundled with the machines, and therefore required no explicit action to install and distribute. Presumably the same argument applies to the operating system, the spreadsheet processor, etc. The one reply I still haven't heard is: "We evaluated the various products and concluded that Microsoft's is the best."

I.T. is just hopeless

The conventional wisdom about Microsoft is hardly a unique issue in I.T. management. Accepting outages as inevitable byproducts of computing technology fits a pattern we've noted before:

A year ago we were amazed by the passive acceptance of catastrophic software upgrade fiascos not only by presumably accountable management but also by the popular media.
Last month we noted sadly that out-of-control projects are still common in application system development, despite decades of major dramatic breakthroughs in technical and managerial methodology.
Several years earlier, we noted a similar phenomenon with respect to the infamous Y2K crisis.

What ever happened to tough-minded management? Why aren't we hearing about the culprits getting fired?

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Last modified August 18, 2005