Given the legendary fanaticism of Mac users, it’s sometimes easy to forget that Windows administrators can be just as bigoted and hidebound as the worst frenzied, puritanical Mac zealot.

Case in point: My current classmates. A discussion thread was posted by the instructor (I’m taking an online class) that set up a hypothetical situation wherein the CTO of a company announced a plan to replace all Windows workstations with Macs; the class was supposed to discuss possible cutover issues.

Instead, what occurred was a wave of visceral phobia and disinformation. One student stated:

MAC’s [sic] do not follow the same IEEE standards that IBM compatible desktops and networks follow. Although networking hardware required by MACs [sic] is already built into the desktops, the cabling system needed will need to be reconfigures [sic]… In addition, speed and transmission rates are slower and end users might experience performance issues…

She cited as her source the entire University textbook library. When I challenged this information as outdated (circa 1996), and asked her for a precise source, she ignored me. A particularly rabid student then posted his answer:

If this were a new CTO at my company I would go straight to the CEO and ask he fire the CTO immediately! Seriously. My company has 50 seats running NT, 10 running UNIX and 3 running OSX… The MACs are for the graphics department and those guys are the only ones who know how to use them… I’d have to transition from Exchange to Linux Sendmail… as Active Directory wouldn’t be of any use… I can’t think of a good reason to do this, even if the new boxes were being offered for free. What a nightmare!

Notice that this fellow never even answered the question at all, just ranted. I challenged him, too, noting that OS X can be integrated into AD, that Microsoft themselves sell a perfectly viable Exchange client for the Mac, that only the workstations were to be transitioned, et cetera. I held my tongue about the fact that NT is, what, a nine-year-old OS? One that even its developer declared dead three years ago? Again, I got ignored, and, while some of the class engaged in some "hear, hear!" backslapping, not one of them responded to my documented challenges to their knee-jerk reactions.

I fully admit that Mac zealots are just as bad, worse, probably, in their blind loyalty to their chosen platform. I’ve seen some pretty frightening forms of simpering, sycophantic adulation at Macworld conferences, let me tell you. My classmates’ fatuous answers and cowardice aside, however, the answers to the teacher’s question are pretty revealing, when the question itself is boiled down into its most basic form: "You have been told that a major change is coming. How do you prepare for it?."

The distilled essence of their responses was "Fight it. Deny it. Refuse it." Not exactly what you’d call intellectually supple, is it? I wonder if some of these folks know what they’ve signed up for, seeing as how they’re studying to earn a degree in IT, perhaps the most notoriously and treacherously shifting field there is these days, outside of holding public office. Would you really want to hire somebody like that?