Yesterday I spent the day at the Vermont Business EXPO. I was there as a board member of the Vermont Sotware Developer Alliance because we had a booth. My pal Joe Golden, who I know through the organization, was also helping out at the booth.
Joe's a Linux guy. He owns Green Mountain Linux. When I first saw Joe in the morning, I didn't recognize him as he had shaved off his full beard that I was used to! (I vote for keeping the new look, Joe.)
Joe's a cool guy, too. But he has this Open Source hatred for all things Microsoft. Fortunately, I seem to be the exception. When I arrived at the booth, he informed me with pride (and a little disgust) that he had actually touched the windows laptop that was being used to run Microsoft Powerpoint in order to get that going in the morning. I brought my Toshiba M400 with the nearly Beta 2 (build 5381) bits on it. He laughed at the Aero glass "Mac's had it for years" and when he saw he gadget bar he said "oh, you have widgets now too!".
Throughout the day when we were talking to people, Joe liked to bring up our purported hate for each other. "She's Microsoft. I'm an Open Source guy. We hate each other."
I wandered around the floor a bit and found a booth with a big sign that said OpenOffice.org. I had to stop there. I had never seen open office. I still haven't, though I saw some screen shots showing representations of each of the products in Open Office. It was explained to me that there was a document program, a spreadsheet program, a PowerPoint program...."Wait!" I said. Are you sure you really want to even make mention of an icchy Microsoft product?" There is also apps that are akin to to Access but one really cool one that is a math app. There were two guys in the booth. I had a great chat with the guy who was helpingn out. The guy who's booth it was wouldn't even talk to me. Okay he was talking with someone and maybe it was a business prospect, but still.... I am still really curious about OpenOffice. I do know it's not some open source project that 12 year olds have their hands in and is a very serious piece of business software. Well, as long as I retai my MVP status, Microsoft Office is free to me, so I guess I'm just lucky!
So I ask you... Why are non-Microsoft techies so passionate about their disdain for all things Microsoft. I don't feel that way about Java or Linux (or Google or Mac, for that matter!). Most of the developers that I know are Microsoft devs and I've never heard the kind of anger against the other technologies. Curiousity is more like it.
By the end of the day, Joe was very impressed with my new way of explaining Vista when I showed it to people. "It's got see through screens like Macintosh and it has widgets but they call them gadgets. It's really cool because I get to have all of the pretty experience that Mac users get, and do some serious number crunching at the same time."
Oh, and the politicians were there, too. But I'll write about that on my other blog.