Fanboys of IT

I assume others have ran into fanboys in IT who won't give product X a fair try because it's from company Y, not Z. Considering how rapidly technology changes in IT, you'd think people would be a little open minded, yet I repeatedly run into these fanboys who'll actively sabotage implementations because it's not from "their" company.

Just a minor rant.

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636-555-3226

Comodo is a big one on my s-list. Had an absolute horrible support session with some dude in the UK who couldn't give a rats arse about my problem using a free demo of their product. I got pretty angry at him, hung up, and put them on my s-list. Every once in awhile a saleperson calls or emails me about one of their latest security offerings or deals and i always let them know I had a 50-100k program in the works that they were the #1 obvious front-runner for and it was blown by some low-level tech support guy.

otherwise i'm fairly open to most companies. some specific products, not so much (i'm looking at you firepower!)

OctalDump

It's far, far easier to have prefered vendors than it is to weigh up all the pros and cons of various products. Put into the mix an even mildly complex set up, and all the interactions between products...

I think this is one of the reasons MS is so dominant: it's just easier to live in their world with their products than figure out how to integrate x with y. And there's also the old saying "no one ever got fired buying IBM".

I don't think it's necessarily laziness or simple fanboyism, it's genuinely beyond some people's capacities.

alias454

I think it stems from a lack of operational maturity. The old adage of the right tool for the job fits well here. I agree with octal. Some of what appears to be fanboyism is lack of depth i.e. I have only ever worked with x so x is going to solve my problem. It's the reason why people use spreadsheets when the right tool is a database - they don't know any better. However, to your point, true fanboys are blind to anything other than their chosen app, platform etc. and can be truly frustrating to work with because of their blindness to better alternatives.

kohr-ah

Soooooooooooo it depends. A lot of Fanboyism I totally agree.
Others it stems from bad experiences and a lot of times it is from older products.

Making this up off the top of my head but lets say Storage. EMC and NetAPP. You are implimenting 7 mode NetAPP and you had to migrate to cluster mode and it went really really wrong but you installed an EMC solution and it went much better. That creates a BIAS in your mind that you then push forward when asked for recommendations.

However when it comes to APPLE, WINDOWS, etc I got nothing but for networking products that is how it goes.
Everyone where I work is Cisco Cisco Cisco.. yeah well I can get a SA5000 dell switch that runs debian with 48 10 gig ports and 4 40gig ports for roughly 5k for our data center.. can your Cisco do that for me?

OctalDump

A long time ago, when I was but a mere hardware tech, I remember the biases against certain hard drive manufacturers, usually based on who had the most recent high profile problem batch. But the thing was, all the major manufacturers had had a bad batch, and by the time you heard about it, the bad batch was no longer being sold, so it didn't have much practical effect. But still, people would say "Brand x is crap, get y or z", or even "Everything except for brand w is crap. I only get brand w."

There was also similar mythology about RAM or mainboards. Actually looking at the manufacturer specs and making a judgement from that, well, who'd do that?

The more you know, the more you tend towards the engineers answer of "Well, it depends..."

Danielm7

I have a very high level coworker who is a HUGE Microsoft fanboy. He's pushed decisions into the company that have caused issues because he always insists the best product for the job is the Microsoft one, no matter what the task. Not good.

TechGromit

dave330i wrote: »

I assume others have ran into fanboys in IT who won't give product X a fair try because it's from company Y, not Z.

Not sure what you mean. We use Cisco switches were I work, our expertise is on Cisco switches, it's highly unlikely we would change to Juniper Network switches just to save a couple bucks. It's entirely possible they are a better product, but training alone would outweigh any cost savings yielded. Cisco product quality would have to drop pretty far before we would consider changing vendors.

OctalDump

TechGromit wrote: »

Not sure what you mean. We use Cisco switches were I work, our expertise is on Cisco switches, it's highly unlikely we would change to Juniper Network switches just to save a couple bucks. It's entirely possible they are a better product, but training alone would outweigh any cost savings yielded. Cisco product quality would have to drop pretty far before we would consider changing vendors.

Yeah, and that isn't blind fanboyism. You aren't choosing Cisco just because of their cool logo and they are THE BEST™, you are basing it on some reasoned approach - that the support costs are going to be lower (getting trained staff who aren't making noob errors because they've never worked with box x), that an homogenous environment can be more predictable etc

On the other side of this, is that sometimes these decisions are actually motivated by misplaced fear (it will all turn to crap if we do it differently, it's too hard) or concerns about moving outside your comfort zone. And there's just cultural inertia - a change could mean lots of people in the organisation doing things differently. To have the ability to recognise where a different approach can work, and then navigating through that change is not a common skill. Hell, even understanding the business problem(s) you are trying to solve is too rare or realising that solving business problems is what you are actually trying to do - it's not all just nice logos and flashing lights.

And ironically, that kind of thing can feed into the notion that a decision is motivated by "fanboyism" - that since product y is technically superior to product x, if you keep using x it must be fanboyism, but as you point out these decisions are made in a broader context, where the idea is to deliver best value to the business and technical superiority is just a part of that.

olaHalo

Well I use a windows phone...
Does that count? Because no one but a fanboy would use one

TechGromit

OctalDump wrote: »

Yeah, and that isn't blind fanboyism. You aren't choosing Cisco just because of their cool logo and they are THE BEST™, you are basing it on some reasoned approach - that the support costs are going to be lower (getting trained staff who aren't making noob errors because they've never worked with box x), that an homogenous environment can be more predictable etc

On the other side of the coin, the company went out and purchased a dozen Checkpoint Firewalls only to find out they do not work with the project equipment we needed them for. They really should have tested Checkpoint Firewall equipment would work with the project before going out and getting a dozen of them. They even paid for 4 days of training for my entire team. That was a Fanboy IT move. They couldn't even return them, they had to sell them on the open market at a discount to get rid of them. That was a couple hundred grand screw up and a resume generating event.

dave330i

TechGromit wrote: »

Not sure what you mean. We use Cisco switches were I work, our expertise is on Cisco switches, it's highly unlikely we would change to Juniper Network switches just to save a couple bucks. It's entirely possible they are a better product, but training alone would outweigh any cost savings yielded. Cisco product quality would have to drop pretty far before we would consider changing vendors.

At one of my first IT jobs, we required a GTM LB. We had Cisco (all our network HW was Cisco) and F5 come and present. If the network guy was a Cisco fanboy, we would have gone with the Cisco GTM solution even though F5 better meet our business requirements and had more feature set.

kohr-ah

olaHalo wrote: »

Well I use a windows phone...
Does that count? Because no one but a fanboy would use one

There are dozens of us! Literally dozens!