Peter Write, the author of a bunch of visual basic books, wrote in his blog about his reasons for completely ditching MS software and moving to OS X and Ruby on Rails.
Over and over I’d be lambasted for being too passionate (a condition muppets refer to as arrogance). Time and again I’d find myself explaining basics of programming to people that should know better, people with years of experience under their belts, people that really didn’t care.
There’s nothing more frustrating than having to waste time explaining basic concepts of your job to a coworker in the same position as yourself. It seems that this is acceptable in the IT, but I can’t imagine it passing in any other field. Working as tech support for 4 years at UCSB’s public computer repair facility introduced me to many techs who didn’t know how to open a computer, what a PCI card was, or that there was any way to fix a computer besides reinstalling Windows. The knowledgable techs were few and far between, and I’ve yet to work with one who had passion for MS software.