Holy Wars

[Ron Sering CDS <ronaldse -at- MANX -dot- CDS -dot- TEK -dot- COM>]

"Ah, Meno, you have returned for more dialogue. Are you ready to acknowledge that perfection exists only in the realm of the forms, of which this world we see is only a pale reflection?"

"Never mind that, Socrates," Meno said. "That's just theoretical stuff. I have come to you with an even greater riddle. Wherein may one find the perfect software product?"

"Pick one, my dear friend Meno, and stick to it. In an imperfect world, consistency is a close cousin to perfection."

   - Excerpt from Plato's unknown dialogue, "The Consultant"

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Andrew, I too am sick of the Holy Wars. You were perfectly justified in telling upper management to use a little muscle. Those kind of debates can hamper an organization, or even bring it to a dead halt. We are engaged in the classic Unix/Windows struggle here, and it seems like it's never going to end. MS Word is supposed to be our company standard for Systems Specs and other planning documents, which I use as the kernel for my docs.

About half of the developers hate Windows and refuse to use it. Consequently, I get information from developers in an alphabet soup of file formats: .TXT files,email postings, .RTF files, and documents produced with the UNIX vi editor (?!?). I write my docs in Interleaf, and so have to use several different paths to get the basic info from where it starts to where it ends up in Interleaf. It is absolutely maddening....

So....if you can get some enthusiastic enforcement from upper management for consistency, it's worth upsetting a few malcontents for the consistency and productivity it creates. Workplaces are not democracies....

- Ron S.