Why is it that every time that I meet an MCSE it seems like they're brainwashed by the propaganda M$ spits out. I know they're dependant on the fact the most Microsoft products are faulty for their paycheck, but they don't have to buy into the propaganda themselves. Great example of this was the client's windows network admin that my company had to work with the other day. -- A little background. We have a web based app that consists mostly of ASP pages for presentation layer and MSSQL for the business logic. We are moving away from ASP towards PHP for multiple reasons which I will not go into in this post. Suffice to say we don't have any interest in migrating to .NET. This windows admin asks us why we're not using .NET. We give him the legitimate answer in short we feel that it will not be able to support where we want to go with our software and development process. Then we proceeded to tell him that we are moving to php with each new module in the software. This was completely unacceptable to him. Suddenly we were using "old" technology and he began to berate about PHP and then Open Source. I have never seen someone with such a hatred for open source software like this. Most people like free stuff regardless of the business model or development practices. He proceeded to tell us how he would never use open source software in any aspect of his business. He started to insult us about our choice of programming language and told us that there weren't any enterprise solutions based on php. This very un-informed man also decided to lash out at open source stating that no business with a open source model could make any real money and that no one out there is making money off open source. Sun, Redhat, IBM, Apple, Novell apparently were unknowns to him. He must have been really erked and uneasy when he noticed one of our developers used a Apple powerbook to develop on. Even when we were using M$ supplied software (SQL Server 2000) this was still not good enough for him. We should be devoloping on their beta software Yukon (MSSQL 2005). Ummmm... No. We will be moving to a more enterprise class solution such as DB2 and Oracle in the future we told him. He went on about how he was using it and it tested fine with him. In the back of my mind I know he was only administering Access driven apps and was not a software programmer and was thinking, what kind of "rigorous" testing could this schmuck put Yukon through? This is the power of M$ propaganda. Not only does this person use their products but he would fight for them and sling rude comments toward people that he had just met minutes before in a business situation. This is ridiculous. The majority of his job maintaining windows boxes for clients is based on patching, securing, and putting out fires with his "superior software", yet he still fails to notice these faults. I'm going to stop before I get on a rant with crappy M$ software and OS. I'll save that for another time. The point here is how rude they usually are with anyone who uses an alternative piece of software. This is not a religious belief or politics, there isn't any reason to get so uptight about someone using different types of tools than you do. Really it's like talking to someone about the new car they bought. As soon as they find out you bought a BMW they start to tell you how it's crap and that not many people use them and that you should have got a Chevy cavalier like he has. Anyways I'm sure this problem will never go away because of the many weak minded individuals out there just waiting for some company with great marketing skills to control their thinking. All I can do is keep writing in this blog to piss them off.