The world of Information Technology as we all know is a very big world, and it only is getting larger and more diverse. As such, it comes with choices – many of them for that matter. With choice also comes opinion. According to Merriam Webster the definition of opinion is:
a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter
In most cases what bloggers write about is their personal viewpoints, or opinions on a topic at hand. They often include facts, however at some point, if it’s IT related, there will be an opinion. Let’s take a few examples that exist in the IT world today:
- Browsers (IE v Firefox v Chrome v Opera)
- Hypervisors (Hyper-V v VMware v VirtualBox)
- Operating Systems (Windows v Linux v Mac)
- Software (Exchange v Lotus v Scalix)
Looking at the aforementioned, there is loads of grey area and what defines the opinion of one versus the other really boils down to the project or question at hand. IE might be best if you need ActiveX. Mac might be best if you’re doing graphics design…
One of the greatest IT project management posters/comics I’ve come across is:
Which describes the IT lifecycle perfectly. What it signifies in a sense is that everyone has a differing opinion. Said best by Nietzsche:
“One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed”
And for that reason, IT is one of the most complex fields in the industry. Everyone is allowed to think what they want and say what they want – it might cause controversy (as my opinion did the other day) – and due to the uncongenial way of reading blog posts, more opinions are formed. Who is right, it really depends on how you look at it and what the point of the article/opinion was in the first place. If we all had the same opinion, we’d all be running bland systems with no uniqueness to them whatsoever and IT wouldn’t be fun at all, would it?
So, here’s to another year of opinions, change and choice in the IT field, and just because I’m a Microsoft MVP and most of my day-to-day work is based on Microsoft technologies doesn’t mean that those solutions will be my defacto answer for everything. What it does mean is that I have a passion for Microsoft technologies and I enjoy sharing that passion with the community, be it at conferences, on my blog, in forums or other various ways. That said, I’m also got various other non-Microsoft certifications and have installed numerous variants of systems in my years as an IT Pro, henceforth, I’ll share my opinions, taking all of that in to consideration.
Here’s to hearing your opinions 
