(Column) - One of my friends work for a Public Relations company that requires creativity. She is in charge of managing promotional campaigns for her clients, therefore, she spends a lot of time working with internal graphics designers and art directors to ensure everything is up to specifications. The problem she has with the company is their lack of platform flexibility. Since she is used to working with the Macintosh platform for creative projects, Microsoft Windows isn’t exactly her platform of choice. I’m sure it’s only a matter of getting used to the Macintosh equivalent applications for Windows to get her comfortable, but whatever her reason may be for discomfort, the lack of platform flexibility is far too common in the corporate world.

Whether its graphics designers demanding a Macintosh platform or software developers demanding Linux workstations, it’s common to hear technically elite complain about the workstations they are required to use in their offices. However, corporations are not to be blamed for this discomfort.

While corporations aren’t perfect and majority of us (including myself) love to tear them apart when given a chance, it’s only fair we give them credit where it’s due. It’s too easy to lay blame on corporations for our lack of competency and elasticity with a wide array of platform choices.

As we all know, the sole purpose of a corporation is to be efficient and boost its bottom line healthily. Depending on the size of the company, if it has to hire administrators to manage Windows, Mac and Linux platforms simultaneously just so it could give its employees the kind of workstation they want, that will put unnecessary pressure on its bottom line. For the technologically advanced, that might not matter too much, but for people who are not as well versed in platforms as they could be, that presents a serious problem to employers.

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