The bad advice keeps on rolling...

First things first - I don't have anything against Microsoft. No, really! It's actually years of dealing with so called 'experts' that has put me off Microsoft more than anything that Microsoft has made.

What I object to is being told that things are the right solution when clearly they are not the best option. Of course, I can see why it happens - you're not going to bite the hand that feeds, after all. But when was the last time you heard an IT person tell you, 'don't buy Microsoft Office, OpenOffice is just as good, (as far as your needs are concerned) it can do everything that MS Office can do and is open source and free'?

I do not know a single person who knows about tech who will look me in the eye and say 'Internet Explorer is the best browser on the market which is why I use nothing else'. They wouldn't dare because they would lose all credibility. It isn't and hasn't been for some time. So why do they pretend it is to their clients? It's been the same for over a decade.

Microsoft do some amazing things and have been real innovators since their inception - Gates is an utter visionary - but they've done some ropey things too. Vista and ME being just two of them. The Zune is another. You know it, I know it. Let's leave it there.

So, why is it that it takes such a brave IT professional to say to a company, 'do you know what, you'd be better off if you used some open source software - maybe even switched to Linux'. The slavish following of the 'one size fits all' 'follow the leader' advice that is so often given in the guise of tech advice is awful, tedious, annoying and just plain wrong. The 'they are the market leader' argument is just lazy - just because a lot of people are making the same mistake does not mean you should follow them.

Sometimes the Microsoft option is right but sometimes it isn't. Practitioners would do themselves a lot of favours in the long run if they introduced a bit of better tech, whether it be non-Microsoft commercial software or open source software.

I know that this is going to wind up a lot of my IT professional followers but I am ready, willing and able to take you on over this. I've spent the weekend discussing this same issue with a former client of mine and they are experiencing just the same phenomenon - and it just isn't wrong.