| Platform Flexibility: Corporations Are Not To Be Blamed |
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Page 2 of 2 Continued... Other than the bottom line, protecting data is more of a serious concern with cross platforms more than anything else. Let’s say you are a software developer who wants to experience Linux. You have tried it before and you feel that you can be more efficient in Linux over Windows while developing a core component of an application. The ideal employer interested in making your life comfortable lets you convert your office workstation from Windows to Linux. You have been coding away on a new platform for two weeks and everything is rosy. Your productivity has gone up and you are thrilled to be using a new platform. But… After two weeks, you decide to make a few custom tweaks just to get the right desktop environment, but while making those tweaks, something goes wrong, and now you are locked out of the workstation. While you should have backed up your data as a responsible developer, you didn’t and now you are at a point of losing everything you have worked on for the past two weeks. Let’s say you lose all data and you end up getting fired from your job. That’s the worst that can happen to you, right? But can you imagine how much the company has lost in terms of an otherwise productive employee who they spent training? They have lost the data, had to fire a good employee and is now at square one in search of a replacement to re-code everything from scratch. Not only did the company lose financially, but it could also have dire consequences competitively. Why? Because of the company’s decision to make its employees delighted with platform flexibility. The employees might not be at fault every time, but companies prefer to generalize and assume everyone in their company knows absolutely nothing about a platform and will cause havoc if given anything but Windows. Do you think your employers want to spend thousands to millions of dollars in Windows licenses when they could very well download a copy of novice friendly Linux distribution and install it on workstations? Not necessarily. It’s not that your employers don’t want to give you platform flexibility, especially if it can increase your productivity, but unfortunately, they don’t have much of a choice. The larger the corporation, the more careful it has to be and the more generalizations it has to make about its employees. Besides, if you are really that elite, then why not prove your smarts with another platform?
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