I saw this article in TechRepublic today. The gist of it is that a small sample (12) of IT managers, directors, and CIOs said they trusted Microsoft more than Google as a technology partner. Now I don’t really buy this poll.. they picked the first 12 respondents from a population of 90 TechRepublic panelists, which makes the sample neither representative nor random. Be that as it may, some of the quotes from respondents were interesting.
“Microsoft, hands down. They have a real enterprise track record and, while not always perfect, they continue to deliver on real business needs and their products eventually exit the beta stage.”
“Microsoft. We are not, nor will we be in the foreseeable future, involved in the ‘cloud’ as an integral part of our internal IT offerings.”
“Google seems to be moving too fast into too many areas. I don’t think they really have a focus on security and trust. Microsoft learned that lesson in a most painful manner.”
“Google. They’re more hungry.”
If you make the following replacements: “Microsoft” –> “IBM” (or “Sun”), “Google” –> “Microsoft”, and “cloud” –> “Windows servers”, this sounds like the same arguments people were making ten years ago when Microsoft and Windows were relative nobody’s in the enterprise data center.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.