Insulting Windows Admins?

I happened to catch a blurb promoting Xandros BridgeWays Management Console. I'm not going to pick any fault with that product; I'm sure it's as grinchy as grinchy can be, but my eyebrows did raise at this:

"Generally speaking, people who administer Windows environments aren't as comfortable working at the text file level, which is more characteristic of Linux, and giving them a graphical interface to manage Linux is a huge win," open source expert Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, told LinuxInsider. "It makes it easier for those organizations to adopt Linux."

Ah.. excuse me? To me, that sounds an awful lot like "Windows folk are too dumb to use a command line, so we're giving them this." Now, yes, I know that's not what they meant, but if I were a top-level Windows admin type, I'd be a little insulted. More than a little, actually.

You see, every good Windows admin I've known is perfectly comfortable at the command line. Of course it's Windows command line, which historically has been less fun than riding a tricycle in an Iron Man race, but still: good Windows admins know their command line. The "pretend" admins may not, but I'm sure the real Windows admins have just as much disdain for those folks as we do.

I know right now somebody reading this is thinking "Windows is SOO pathetic, dude.. whatcha defending it for?".

I'm not: I agree that Windows is an awful OS, painful to live with and even more painful to administer. That's why you and I do Unix and Linux, right? But that doesn't mean that the poor people who have to keep those systems running are incompetent boobs - actually, in many situations they have to work harder and need much more creativity and problem solving skills than we do!

So let's not denigrate our fellow admins and pretend that they aren't capable of handling Linux or Unix systems. Yes, yes, yes: I know there are a lot of "fake" admins in the Windows world, people who really don't know much of anything about the systems they supposedly are responsible for. It completely disgusts me when I run across some supposed Windows admin who doesn't know as much as I do about Windows - because trust me, I don't know much. But I also know that there are really sharp, really capable Windows admins and I don't believe for a minute that any of them would have any problem with Linux, command line or not. They are bright people, and just like us they know what's going on "underneath", so they can figure things out. They'll adjust, they'll investigate, they'll read and research, and they'll learn.

It's really insulting to imply that they wouldn't, isn't it?.

Comments /Microsoft/not-that-dumb.html


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