Cringley on Microsoft and Linux

brentlaminack writes "Time for this week's dose of I, Cringely. This week the Cringe talks about Ballmer's Orlando comments from this week. He compares Ballmer's comments with Linus's. Nothing new here for the /. group, but a good read for the non-technical."

Comments

"cognitive dissonance"

[ummit]

Don Norman (who if you haven't read him, you should) has a bit in his book The Design of Everyday Things about a psychology experiment in which the subjects were asked to write an essay arguing against some point they'd ordinarily believe in. Some of the subjects were paid money to write the essay, some were asked to do it for next to nothing. Then, later, they were interviewed to find how strongly their former beliefs held, or how much they might have changed their minds.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the people who had been paid more would be more apt to change their minds, but actually, the reverse was true. The explanation is that the people who were paid could resolve the conflict in their mind between the beliefs they held and the contradictory statements they were writing by saying "heck, I still don't believe this, I'm not writing it because I believe it or anything, I'm writing it because I'm being bribed to." But the people who didn't have that "out" had to resolve their own cognitive dissonance another way, and for some of them, at least, the way was to realize that maybe there was something to the counterargument, after all.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I was eerily reminded of it while reading Ballmer's arguments that Microsoft's commercial software is "obviously" better because it's written by professional programmers who are paid for it.

But if you're getting paid to write code, and the code is (for whatever reason) crap, that you can't take pride in, you can at least feel good about all the lovely $$$ you're being paid. The open source programmer, on the other hand, who is doing it for love rather than money, doesn't have that out, so has a much higher incentive to write code that's not crap, because feeling good about it is the only reward.