While leading up to an advocacy for the Mac as the backbone of corporate IT, the Good Times essay by John Gruber is really an advocacy piece on the importance of open standards and an insightful warning into the ways the IT world gets twisted to serve the technologists rather than those who must use their chosen technologies, exemplified with the sorry and irrational state of corporate Outlook/Exchange addictions.

The solution is to ask whom Outlook is good for. It’s not good for the world at large, as witnessed the problems caused by each Outlook virus outbreak ... once a month or so, there would be a voice mail message warning everyone not to launch Outlook until we got another voice mail indicating the coast was clear. No one but me saw this situation as absurd.

I've been there. The only voice-mail to ever arrive in my Medialinx mailbox (since I was the off-site consultant) was these regular Outlook warnings. John continues by asking questions of how email is actually used, what purpose and use-case it serves for real people, and how these 'extra' and proprietarily hidden complexities of Outlook are not really serving the staff body, but enslaving their minds; John also proposes a sinister and political reason for why CIO's are so fond of Exchange and other similar seemingly paradoxical technology choices where the utility is lost in the beauty of the weapon ...

Most corporations now have a CIO (chief information officer), whose clout is directly proportional to the number of people employed in the company’s IT division. More IT staff means a larger budget, and budgets are the rulers used to measure wangs in corporate America.

It is thus in the interests of corporate IT staff to deploy technology that requires a large IT staff for maintenance.

An interesting thesis, and as an escape from it, John proposes how a change in political perks might veer the CIO into serving the needs of their constituents, and how a change in the corporate expectations for IT departments, one that no longer anneals to the Outlook/Exchange types of security risk solutions, might dampen the next Sobig.F@mm vacation:

It’s all about expectations. We, as a society, have decided that indoor plumbing should be held to high standards of reliability and maintenance. And somehow we’ve been convinced that indoor computing should not.

[ Source: Daring Fireball: Good Times ]