An Open Letter to CyrusN
Recently, Cyrus (a microsofty) posted on his blog his opinions on tabbed web browsers. As soon as I saw it I started following it, dreading but knowing the sort of responses that were going to come flodding in.
I was right, and it prompted me to write the following letter to him. Instead of clicking send, I decided to post it here. If he's a decent person, he'll be reading my blog - ok, scratch that, but I can dream can't I? All Microsofties should be subscribed to me...right? Anyway, I'm going to presume that he'll see my trackback, because I think it feels a bit egotistical to just mail someone saying 'come read my blog'.
But here's what I wrote.
Hey Man,
I've been following your thread on tabs in browsers. I'm one of those guys that agrees with you about them, however that's not why i'm writing this. My opinion on whether they are good or bad, or yours, is our own to have, and that's great.
When you first did that post I was particularly intrigued as to what the response would be, given the fact that you've opened the floodgates to a common (geeks) religious argument. Tabs or not is up there with firefox or IE, or C# or VB. There's no safe place to be when these 'discussions' break out.
As i expected, the flame war commenced pretty damn quickly.
Why is it that stating an opinion on some of these topics is not welcoming a discussion, but inviting abuse? I commend you for braving the force of the attack was bound to come, and I imagine you've said a lot of things to the screen before answering with comments that were a lot more polite and restrained.
I can only imagine some of the flack you (re: all MS employees, if they have a public presence of some sort) have to put up with from some people (I call them the 'slashdotters', and I don't mean it in a nice way :)
To have to put up with some of the stuff that appears in different MS blogs must require a lot of effort to handle.
So I just wanted to say well done, keep up the good work, and know that some of us are sane reasonable that appreciate all peoples opinions and respect their choices :)
--Geoff
Why is it that some people respond with reaosnable opinions and some just feel the need to attack? Sure, I sometimes do the same thing, but mostly only face to face, and most often only in jest.
Having said that, I still think that damn VB6 petition is a dumbass idea *grin*
Listening to: Greg Low talk about ADO.net 2.0