Earlier today I was writing about passion brands and the unacknowledged value of community.
I got a small but interesting example of this principle in action when I visited Ton Zijlstra’s blog to find that he’s opened a separate blog on his planned abandonment of Microsoft.
“Do I want to get rid of Microsoft on my system that functions as a server? Yes it’s high time. I’m tired of patching security holes that should not have been there to begin with.
I’m also not looking forward to continue paying hefty prices for licenses to software that seems to make decisions I never asked for because it ‘knows best’ and never lets me see exactly what it does.
Tired of error messages that offer no explanation nor a route to solve it yourself, only the possibility to send a report to the vendor. Tired of dozens of errors and entries in the registry that should not be there, and are only there because the system makes them and then reports them back to me (if I’m lucky).”
Within a few hours, Ton gets 7 comments from around the net offering encouragement and practical help with the trials of converting.
If I put to one side the pros and cons of Microsoft, I think it’s very interesting how quickly the Open Source community rallies to help Ton make the change.
And as I blogged earlier, the real value being created in these exchanges does not show up at the stock market.
