Beating People Up

Filed in archive Vendor on February 23, 2006

the lone sysadmin » Beating People Up:

"As a sysadmin I see this a lot from coworkers and vendors, where someone will walk up to me and tell me that I should be doing something in a specific way. I shouldn't use Windows on my desktop, I should use Mac OS X, or BeOS, or Linux, or OS/2. I should really install Konfabulator (now the Yahoo! Widget Engine). "I can't believe you're not using Opera," or Firefox 1.0.7, or Flickr, or OpenOffice, or Java 1.5. It isn't that they're suggesting it, it's that I'm wrong for not seeing things their way."

I see this a lot - often from vendors. Vendors often have chronic tunnel vision - they're blind to the rest of the market, they know only their products, and they 'know' their products are the best. Quite often, if I disagree with what a vendor is saying, or don't fully understand their point, I get a sense of scorn from them - the impression that they *know* I'm wrong, I must be, because I disagree with them.

It irks me. I'm glad I'm not alone.