You'll never get fired for recommending IBM - sorry - Microsoft

[MHawkins () TULLIB COM]

Hi Marcus,

The strength of a company is in its employees honesty and loyalty combined.

We security folk know what that is. It's giving the CTO, CEO and the Board
the bad news no matter how much they don't like taking their medicine. But
if I work for the Company then I ought not to be broadcasting my displeasure
to the entire world. Keep it in the Board room.

But, it gets a little fuzzy when I work for a Company that has Microsoft as
a customer.

And it gets even more fuzzy when I write papers independently and I also
work for a Company that has Microsoft as a customer.

Regarding monoculture, let me use a common analogy. My car is no more or
less secure than any other car because it's a car among several
manufacturers, with hundreds of car alarm manufacturers and products,
services. Imagine a world for car thiefs where 99% of the cars are made by
one manufacturer and car alarm manfacturers are only allowed to stick their
alarms in the passenger compartment. No security device is allowed under the
hood. There'd be more stolen cars per day than the public would be willing
to accept. Things would change. The monopoly would be broken up.

Should we accept the same in the computer industry?

Can anyone think of a monopoly of a manufacturer good like Microsoft has
today?

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with Microsofts monopoly.
Monopolies are not necessarily a bad thing provided that we get the best
price for the product and we always have a choice of going elsewhere (hang
on - what's a monopoly then?).

And in my experience, right now we have the choice and we can certainly get
a good price. There are so many products and services out there. The problem
is with the CTO's and it gets back to your reference to Elbert Hubbard.
Todays CTO's are like the engineers of old who knew they would never get
fired for recommending IBM. Todays CTO's know they'll never get fired for
using Microsoft. But if you look at the numbers and you look at the
products. I would suggest that any organization today could still function
with equal productivity and competitiveness using a critical mass of Linux,
Solaris, Novell, etc with just a sprinkling of Microsoft to support a few
app's that won't work anywhere else but MS. It just takes a CTO or VP
willing to put the business case forward, run a pilot and prove the numbers.
But that takes real courage, loyalty and honesty.

There are companies that do it now. Let's see how the market works things
out.

By the way, at no other time have I heard more CTO's complain about
Microsoft (some bitterly) than after MSBlast. Maybe Microsoft is going the
way of IBM. You can and will get fired if you don't look at what else is out
there.

Mike H
_______________________________________________
firewall-wizards mailing list
firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com
http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards