So, here I am in the middle of Silicon Valley, every programmer's dream, I will be here a full week, I have the NASA Research Center about 5 minutes from my hotel, and Google even closer, I am also about 10 min from Cupertino, yet I am completely screwed up.., the reason, you may ask?...

Microsoft Windows

My company has sent me to an intensive training course in Microsoft's "Dynamics" (or as the MS folks call it: "CRM"), I know, I know, it is *not* the same, it is called both, it is named both, whatever...

As many folks my age, I was introduced into computers in the late 80's, I breathed Microsoft (was it anything else? - I know), I programmed countless systems in Basic, Basic PDS, Visual Basic, Pascal and C on my DOS-Then-Windows PC for about 10 years.

In the Late 90's a big, big change happened, I was introduced to the real programming world, I was exposed to Linux and never looked back - for 12 years - out of those 12 years, the past 6 have been alternating between OS X and several flavors of Linux, mainly Red-Hat-ish (RH, Fedora, CentOS) and later Ubuntu. This *is* life.

Then, an offer a couldn't (literally) refuse, working for a multi-billion dollar company, established since the 70's and the Job assignment couldn't be better: Python Programming.

Turned out that I was hired to work on python alright, but to convert all the python systems (which were working flawlessly) into the .Net platform. Oops! - Ok, I am a team player and converted several major systems to C# giving my best efforts without hesitation. Now we're moving even further, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

So here I am every day visiting the "Microsoft Technology Center" headquarters in Silicon Valley, supposedly It wouldn't be rare to encounter Steve Ballmer anytime in the food court, and many "bloggers" of Microsoft Technologies that are idolized around the globe. All of them nice folks, really. Just.. misguided.

What I've seen so far for Dynamics frankly disgusts me, yes, it is a beast, monster, heck it is not even a CRM, is a framework that allows you to create CRM systems, huge, very "pretty" but an incredible huge mess of decoupled "entities" that optionally tie up among themselves to create a system of some sort. What will happen? (As usual in Microsoft products), you'll spend millions in deployment, conversions, etc, and everyone will be happy for a little while, then it'll come "Service Pack 1, 2", etc, or even better, version "6.0" which will make all the Sharepoint and Outlook plug-ins incompatible, but hey, "we can help", the Microsoft's "Technology Partners" (gold, silver, platinum, you name the precious metal) and the cycle begins again.

I don't really care if I am called another "windows basher", but how could this be a troll if I have lived 10 years on each platform? - I wouldn't be commenting this had I not used both (windows and non-windows) platforms for at least 10 years each.

And yet, I see all the folks in the training room looking at me like I am from another planet when after giving me a "microsoft employee discount" card (So I could go to the store downstairs to get some games, shirts, pens, etc) I tell them that I do not use, nor own any microsoft products, h..h..how can this be Julio...