Most IT guys working with Microsoft technologies would know the phrase
eating your own dog food.
For those have never heard the term, to say that a company "eats its
own dog food" means that it uses the products that it makes/sells.
My
question is what if you don't want to eat dog food? Or what if someone
else makes better tasting dog food? Should you only eat one brand of
dog food out of loyalty?
At
WebCoda
we work with Microsoft Technologies so up until recently I ate
Microsoft flavor everything. Lately though I find myself straying and
it's at once both exciting and unnerving.
Where did I go wrong, how has it come to this you ask?
Well
let me take you back about a year when I decided I would try working
with Firefox as my main browser instead of Internet Explorer. It all
seemed so innocent at the time.
My IE was playing up and was taking way too long to start loading new web pages.
Before I knew it, I was installing plugins. Oh at first it was just little ones like the
color picker and the
measuring tool. But before I knew it I had installed the
web dev toolbar and
Firebug.
I knew at this point I was a goner. I could never go back to boring old
IE that was still taking 3 weeks to load up a simple web page and had
as much decent functionality as an Ipod - Very little. (Hey I could
have said as a Mac).
The next step in my demise came when we switched our mail over to
Google Apps.
Maybe it was the 25 gig of mail storage or maybe it was all the extra
apps such as calendar, documents and mobile access. Or maybe it was the
moonlight. I can't say but suddenly I found myself using Thunderbird
instead of Outlook (gasp!!). The integration with IMAP and Google
calendar was too much to resist.
I am now having regular
arguments with my business partner over whether we should store company
info and documents in Sharepoint or whether we use Google sites or one
of the many other such sites out there.
The reason is this. Why
should we host our own sites which need regular backing up, only have
internal access and need to be upgraded manually when we can let
someone like Google handle all these things? Everytime I log into one
of the google sites there seems to be a new feature they have added
like a little gift that you were not expecting.
Don't get me
wrong. I am a big fan of Microsoft products - The operating Systems
(Except Vista), Media Center is awesome and of course the programming
tools and languages rock.
Maybe it's just that I don't like the taste of dog food.
