Monoculture downside

More Dynomite! from John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. He says:

Incompetent IT professionals are genuinely convinced that PCs are inherently so complicated that they cannot be expected to perform with high-reliability and low maintenance. All over the world, this very week, they are being asked by frustrated friends and family, Why is my email riddled with messages from this virus? And they are responding, with authority and confidence, Trust me, I'm a professional, this is just how it is. You string together a few million computers on a network and this sort of thing is inevitable.

They (the incompentent IT drones) aren't lying. They believe it. They believe it because they don't really understand computers - they just know Windows. In the same way that peasants in Ethiopia can't conceive of a country where even the poor have plenty of food, someone who only knows Microsoft software can't conceive of a platform where computers just work.