As it turns out, the IT community does not take its cues from me. I don’t know what best explains their continued obduracy, if not my marginal talent and divided attentions. I can only hope they get their act together before I lose patience and change careers.

Even so, the readers of Infoworld have shown remarkable progress towards the goal of recognizing my innate genius and rightful industry leadership. Attend:

Best Operating System
No, we don’t use Windows 2003 Server at work, but then nobody really does in production right now. We are, however, currently contemplating a shift from Windows to Linux (yes, probably RedHat 8.0) under my urging. That’s number two on the list.

Best Application Development and Integration Product
Macromedia Studio MX? Ooo-kay…. Note that we are number three on this list with IBM Eclipse. NetBeans, where art thou? Under 0.7%, looks like. (I think this phenomenon can be explained by the definition of this category, but I’m not sure about that.)

Best Application Server
I know what you’re thinking: Apache Jakarta is the name of a group of open-source Java projects, not an application server. Yes, yes, you’re right. Of course they mean Tomcat, the application server we use at work. Who’s your daddy?

Best Web Services Product
Why, yes, I agree. Which is why I chose Axis to host our web services.

Best Database
As a user of the number two product on this list, I do actually wonder what they mean by “best.” However, when considering the $300,000.00 entry cost of the top product on the list, and the $0.00 entry cost of the second product, I think the calculus comes into focus.

So we are in the top three in five out of fourteen readers’ choice categories–five out of six categories if you narrow the field to only those things that a company of our size would normally purchase. Which clearly shows recognition of my genius. Or my luck. Or my cheerful conformity to the will of the herd.

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• Posted by Tim on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 at 7:53:06 am PDT
• Category: Miscellany
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