John Gruber has posted an excellent new column on Daring Fireball concerning Macs, Computer Reliability and the incompetence and uselessness of corporate IT departments.
Imagine if the plumbing in corporate America worked with the same degree of reliability as their computer infrastructure. This would mean that individual sinks, urinals, and toilets would go out of order on a regular basis. Water from drinking fountains would turn brown, but, hey, that’s just how it is. Every few weeks, teenage pranksters from Hong Kong would overflow every toilet in the building, knocking them out of commission.
John really is a great writer and knows how to make his points. Now he has convinced me to dislike IT departments even more than I did before.
Aww... and I wanted to be a head of an IT department someday. At least I'm not some crazy guy who doesn't know what everyone else wants.
These type of analogies are pretty common, comparing IT to this or that... They're funny, but they never seem to drive home the mission statement that IT, computers and software, as we know them, are not in a good state... we've become accepting to the issues that we have with computers, accepting "bugs" and "quirks" with the systems just because "that's the way it is", and it should be different, it could be better.
The analogies, again, are funny, but they don't do the message right... maybe we should find a way to get the message across...