So, I haven’t posted in a while, and for that I am sorry. Now that that’s behind us, we will move on.

For the past (seemingly) infinity days, I’ve been attending a MCSA Boot Camp down in Atlanta. Not only is this my first foray into the world being a Microsoft Certified Professional, but it is my first foray into the world of the South (excluding Florida, which I’m told doesn’t count).

The South is really not that different from the North. The main differences are in the the form of Waffle Houses, Chic-Fil-A, grits, and temperature. All of these things I am okay with since they are either delicious or mitigated by omnipresent air conditioning. Having said that, I haven’t really been any places other than my hotel room in Marietta or the training facility about a mile down the road. I guess I’ll have to reserve the true exploration for next time.

Spending all that time in two places does mean that I have joined the ranks of the Microsoft army. My acronym count alone has probably doubled, and I can proudly call myself a Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (soon to be Engineer). Aside from the obvious benefits to my career, the boot camp taught me how to think like a Microsofty. The sheer number of products and services MS provides with Windows server environments is truly impressive. You can literally run your entire network with Microsoft products and ethernet cable. Why buy a Cisco hardware router when you can have a Microsoft Routing and Remote Access Server?

While some of these services are crappy and almost pointless when such excellent third party solutions exist, I was impressed by Microsoft’s audacity to try and corner literally every possible market. At one point during class, our instructor said [I’m paraphrasing] “You need to know about this for the exam. If you ever take a job and the company is running this service, quit, because it means they are too cheap to buy a real solution.” I can see the advantage for a small business to use a single MS server that can run their entire network (DHCP, DNS, routing, VPN, mail, etc), but you will need a highly trained individual to figure all that crap out. It’s not like you can just turn it on and have it work.

And that really illustrates the crux of all of this. As much as I want to hate Microsoft, they have some good products. But why don’t they strip out some of the services from Windows server that no one will ever use for more than 20 minutes, and work on making their good products even better. Alas, this goes against the Microsoft philosophy: they’ll let you try to do anything, no matter how crappy or unmanageable it is. I’m kind of interested in getting some Apple certs now. Will they teach me that services they don’t provide because they can’t figure out a nice way to implement them don’t exist?