I just read today and yesterday Paul Murphy's LinuxWorld articles on Linux TCO. Although all of his examples were only "virtual" case studies, I think it drives home a good point - UNIX development is a mostly can-do culture, while Windows development is usually a fight-fires culture, where little gets done. In fact, almost every time I go into a large all-Windows shop I get hit with that feeling.

When I worked at Wolfram, the application developers said "yes" to almost every request. In fact, it was usually, "yes, I'll get that done today" or "yes I'll get that done this week". It wasn't, "no, that's not possible with this system" or "yes we can buy that, spend a month testing it, and another month integrating it if it works".

Obviously, we had our problems, but they were pretty minor. Wolfram Research is a decent-sized company, and we maintained a pretty small IT staff for being a technology company.

Anyway, reading that made me want to purchase his book at http://www.winface.com/ I hope it's as good as the linuxworld stuff.

It also makes me long to be an independent consultant. Unfortunately, that does not give the medical benefits my family needs :)