Most people in the blogosphere tend to be more technologically oriented than the average person. This is likely to change as companies and individuals provide tools that make reading/writing web logs easily accessible to the average person on the street; as well as the move by many content providers to provide their content via RSS/Atom feeds. However currently most comments I see on web logs (especially technology focused ones) are made by people who bring with them a strong technological bias. These people use (or have rejected) particular operating systems, tools, and software that has in turn shaped their perceptions when it comes to making judgments on the various merits of particular technologies. People tend to categorize or identify themselves with particular "technological cultures"; some of the most common being type of operating system they use (e.g. Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.), development platform (e.g. Java, .NET), and programming language (e.g. C#, VB.NET, Java). Participation and identification with these cultures brings with it a tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own technological culture, or technocentrism.

If you do not make an effort to be aware of being technocentric, it is easy to fall into becoming a zealot of the the technology you identify most with. I find myself guilty of this at times, and see the results of technocentrism most often in the back and forth arguments of many blog comment posts. You can find this sort of rabid fanaticism and heated arguments all over the Internet, and in my opinion it is to the detriment of all participants. I have grown tired of the usual arguments that Windows is vulnerable to viruses and Linux/Apple operating systems are not, when no one points out that the lack of viruses is not due to inherent security but because nobody cares about writing viruses for the minority systems. I have grown tired of how Microsoft ignores their public image. There is nothing wrong with open source software, just as there is nothing wrong with selling software for a profit. Both can co-exist without all of us ending up resorting to some sort of technology jihad.

I like to think I stand somewhere in the middle of the typical arguments I find myself drawn into. I think Microsoft makes excellent (notice I did not say perfect) products that are worth paying for and are good enough that you see there products and interfaces basically cloned in OSS projects like Gnome/KDE and OpenOffice. I don't think Microsoft is infallible nor do I think they will remain a major competitor if they do not constantly learn from their competitor's successes and keep innovating to meet customer needs. I think open source solutions can be the better choice for many problems, and try to choose accordingly, but I do not think that it is inevitable that OSS will lead to some sort of glorious revolution if given enough time for the masses to realize it is the one true path. Zealots on both sides need to wake up if they think the other side is destined to lose. I like the idea of contributing to the community by working on open/shared source projects, but I do not buy into the socialist agenda I sometimes see that says making money selling software is inherently evil.

In conclusion, I think there are too many zealots and not enough evangelists. What will you end up choosing to be?

Update:

I noticed a track-back from this blog, which in turn pointed to this other blog. If you happen to be using a non-Internet Explorer browser, let me quickly explain the insanity that is enfolding. It seems some people have intentionally modified their blogs/web sites so that they render differently based on the browser you are using. Usually browser detection is used to ensure that a web site renders properly for a variety of platforms, but now we see that this ability can be used for the reverse. If you are using a version of Internet Explorer you get the web site in black and white coloring and it tends to be very, very ugly. If you are using another browser such as FireFox, it renders in color and the font is actually readable. Internet Explorer users also get a message like "Why pay for black and white when you can get full color for free?" at the top of the page. Last time I checked IE was:

• Freely available for download.
• Able to render pages in color.
• Not the only browser that was vulnerable to exploits, just the most common, and so becomes the most targeted.

This might be the first example of technological racism I have seen. I run both IE and FireFox, and at least try to make a stab and ensuring web applications I develop render on both browsers. It seems I have been wasting my time trying to ensure usability when I could have been spending it trying to proselytize to the masses on the evils of Internet Explorer. It is not often that you come across such well balanced, fact based and non-biased commentary as you can find on http://browsehappy.com/why/ (Insert sarcasm here). They even provide a variety of promotional buttons that you can place on your web site to spread this techno-racism to others. If Microsoft tried to engage is a campaign like this there would be hell to pay, but this sort of crap gets packaged as some sort of grass-roots movement that hides the anti-Microsoft rhetoric.

It scares me that people have moved from just not caring about how an application displays in other browsers (unfortunate, but human nature) and are now actively trying to modify people's perceptions by targeting the technology they are against. Are we going to have to start spoofing our browser information to stop this sort of crap? Don't we have enough problems to solve without people actively adding to them?

I thought that when I mentioned a technological jihad, I was just be a smart-ass. It turns out there are already people actively engaged in a coordinated fight against others who do not share their particular brand of technocentrism. Are we going to stand up to the techno-racism of these zealots or will we close our eyes to it until it is too late?