This is a response to the InformationWeek article, “Why Doesn’t Microsoft Have A Cult Religion?” that Ars Technica also responded to.

I may be a Linux fanboy but I “worked” for Microsoft before and they do have a cult following. I don’t know how it is in the US but here in the Philippines, they have a very active community. In fact, most of my classmates wanted to study .NET for its ease of use, short learning curve, seamless integration, nice IDE and its popularity.

Unfortunately for them, my powers were strong enough to force PHP as the language for the project (supposed to be Java). They must hate me now. I wonder how Ash is doing at IBM.

I’m grateful enough to have been in the company of Jasper, Microsoft’s largest fanboy in the Philippines. He’s president of the Philippine .NET Users’ Group (PHINUG). Just so you know, Microsoft [Philippines] has a lot of evangelists and if I’m not mistaken there are more MSFT organizations.

I don’t only know a tech evangelist but I also encountered an MCSE that really looked way down on Linux as a hard-to-maintain enterprise OS. This guy was the chief software architect or the big kahuna of a large travel agency here. Their development team is paid on a per-project basis. Their charges are ridiculously overpriced that other departments prefer to outsource most of the projects.

Not to mention that he likes his black Technet jacket. But to be fair. I also like to wear the Polgas shirt and the theSpoke laptop bag is my only bag.

Think about it. When was the last time an editor was fired because of a scathing article entitled, “10 Things We Hate About Microsoft?” When was the last time a group of developers stood up at a VS Live show and shouted … “Yea, man! Orcas Rocks! Language Integrated Query is da’ Bomb! New and improved ADO.Net? Oh, no you didn’t!” It just doesn’t happen.

I love this paragraph but I saw this happen once or twice. I was amused at some level the first time VS2005 was demonstrated but I’m not the WYSIWYG type of guy.

My guesstimate is that 4 in 5 developers I know are more knowledgeable at .NET than FOSS platforms. As for Xbox, zune and Vista fans, I still have to meet them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 15.38.19 and is filed under Software/Code, Techitude, foo, bar and h4xx1ng. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.