Monoculture wars

The feedback on my recent column about the advantages of monoculture — that is, standardizing on one platform or vendor — was anything but monolithic. Any discussion of monoculture risks devolving into anti-Microsoft ranting. One reader ended an otherwise rational e-mail by proving that Godwin’s Law (“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”) also applies to e-mail discussions: “Remember, Hitler wanted a monoculture.” That’s the first time in the three-plus years I’ve been writing this column that I’ve elicited even the faintest Hitler comparison. I guess I’ve finally arrived.

Different readers saw various hidden agendas in my column. One read my column and saw the most hardcore of Mac evangelists: “You are becoming the new ‘Macevangelist’ since Guy Kawasaki bailed out.” Another reader urged me to ditch both Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote and move everyone to OpenOffice on Linux: “Companies that make operating systems should not make application software. When they do, they are using one product to sell the other in a field of unfair competition. Oddly enough, OpenOffice Impress would work on both platforms and toss Linux in free of charge. Your presentation would flow from one platform to the other without alteration. And, workers can now use the platform for which they are most productive. And at the end of the day, isn’t productivity the Holy Grail we are seeking?”

Productivity is certainly one of the grails of IT, but I’m not sure that this reader’s proposal would either fight monoculture or enhance productivity. I think it smacks of the absolutist idealism I mentioned in my last column. If I took this reader’s advice and allowed users to run the platform of their choice, a large majority would undoubtedly choose Windows.

Most people just don’t share technologists’ passion for computing platforms and simply want to get a job done in a familiar environment, regardless of that environment’s flaws. What’s on today’s lunch menu in the company cafeteria is more top-of-mind for most employees. “For Dummies” books about PowerPoint are freely available at the mall bookstore, and computer training centers are awash in PowerPoint classes. Ubiquitous software packages offer the path of least resistance to average users. Moving to a Linux desktop and open source office suites requires bold leadership from people like Sam Palmisano, the IBM Chairman and CEO who challenged IBM’s CIO to move all of IBM’s internal desktops to Linux by the end of 2005.

Some readers were quite direct in their response to my laments about the pains of supporting a diverse environment, epitomized by this nugget from one reader: “I think I pretty much have to tell you to suck it up. There’s no substitute for the security and efficiency of Linux on the back end, nor the ease of use as a desktop [and virus-proofness] of a Mac, and sometimes there are simply things that won’t run on anything else but Windows.” This readers’ pragmatism reflects the reality of running IT that we should all expect for years to come. When all is said and done, the core function of IT is taking a mix of technologies, platforms, and business processes and fashioning the chaos into working and manageable systems. Monoculture might be praiseworthy in some respects, but in a heterogeneous world, the real value of IT rests in making disparate systems work.