Most IT guys working with Microsoft technologies would know the phrase
eating your own dog food. For those have never heard the term, to say that a company "eats its own dog food" means that it uses the products that it makes/sells.
My question is what if you don't want to eat dog food? Or what if someone else makes better tasting dog food? Should you only eat one brand of dog food out of loyalty?
At
WebCoda we work with Microsoft Technologies so up until recently I ate Microsoft flavor everything. Lately though I find myself straying and it's at once both exciting and unnerving.
Where did I go wrong, how has it come to this you ask?
Well let me take you back about a year when I decided I would try working with Firefox as my main browser instead of Internet Explorer. It all seemed so innocent at the time.
My IE was playing up and was taking way too long to start loading new web pages.
Before I knew it, I was installing plugins. Oh at first it was just little ones like the
color picker and the
measuring tool. But before I knew it I had installed the
web dev toolbar and
Firebug. I knew at this point I was a goner. I could never go back to boring old IE that was still taking 3 weeks to load up a simple web page and had as much decent functionality as an Ipod - Very little. (Hey I could have said as a Mac).
The next step in my demise came when we switched our mail over to
Google Apps. Maybe it was the 25 gig of mail storage or maybe it was all the extra apps such as calendar, documents and mobile access. Or maybe it was the moonlight. I can't say but suddenly I found myself using Thunderbird instead of Outlook (gasp!!). The integration with IMAP and Google calendar was too much to resist.
I am now having regular arguments with my business partner over whether we should store company info and documents in Sharepoint or whether we use Google sites or one of the many other such sites out there.
The reason is this. Why should we host our own sites which need regular backing up, only have internal access and need to be upgraded manually when we can let someone like Google handle all these things? Everytime I log into one of the google sites there seems to be a new feature they have added like a little gift that you were not expecting.
Don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of Microsoft products - The operating Systems (Except Vista), Media Center is awesome and of course the programming tools and languages rock.
Maybe it's just that I don't like the taste of dog food.