Technology moves us forward; therefore, you would wonder that the people who work with computer technology on a day-to-day basis would be forward-thinking individuals. Unfortunately, you will find a great deal of computer technologist who are very religious about their own choices and will aggressively flame others who have alternative opinions.

Years ago I was in a room with a great technologist who was conducting a phone interview over a speaker phone. During the interview, he asked the interviewee on the line, “I am about to ask you a religious question, do you mind?”

There was a short pause on the other side but the interviewee quickly stated that it was OK to ask. The great technologist asked, “What text editor do you use - vi or Emacs?”.

If we look at the wars that are fought on a daily basis in the world of technology, a brief list would look like:

* vi vs emacs — war of the text editors
* Open Source vs Microsoft - The Cathedral and the Bazaar war
* Linux vs Windows - TBW
* Internet Explorer vs Netscape
* Internet Explorer vs Firefox
* Intel vs Motorola — CISC vs RISC
* Microsoft vs Sun - war of the monopoly and TBW
* Netscape vs Microsoft — war of the good and evil
* Google vs Microsoft — war of the good and evil
* Apple vs Rest of the World
* Java vs PHP vs Ruby vs Perl vs Python vs Java vs C-sharp vs Coldfusion vs …. - endless war of the languages

Perhaps, we are exposed to these wars more than others since the technology is our primary media — USENET News groups, Web sites, blogs, forums, etc.

Since technologists create these new media and are savvy users of the technology themselves, perhaps it is why we see these wars take place so close to our micro ecosystems of knowledge.

STATUS