In the last few blogs, we have been discussing various facets of Microsoft certification and how it relates to your career (hot skills, interviewing, and salary implications). This has been somewhat of a Microsoft centric view on things, and today I want to step back and look at the big picture and discuss career diversification.
To start out with, you need to understand three key things. The first is that even though Microsoft tries to provide complete software solutions, that doesn’t necessarily mean that their software can effectively meet every business need. For example, as part of their Windows Server operating system, Microsoft provides the capability to do software RAID (disk striping/mirroring). And that topic is even included in some of the MCSE certification exams. In my professional career, I have never seen Microsoft’s software RAID used in a production environment. It’s common street knowledge that hardware RAID offers better performance and more reliability than software RAID. Most experienced Windows systems engineers would never for a second consider using Microsoft’s software RAID in a production environment. On a more practical note, check out a feature like Oracle’s Real application clustering (RAC), and see if Microsoft has anything like that in their SQL Server product offerings. I don’t think you’ll find it.
The second thing to understand is that Microsoft has a void at the high-end. For example, in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space, Microsoft has Dynamics Navision, which probably works fine for most companies with annual revenue of $100 million dollars or less. To put this in perspective, Company #999 on the Fortune 1000 list for 2008, Leap Wireless, had an annual revenue of $1.6 Billion. So if Navision scales well into the $100 Million range, and the smallest of the Fortune 1000 companies has a revenue of $1.6 Billion, that should tell you that Microsoft doesn’t have an ERP solution for the majority of Corporate America. Fortune 1000 ERP implementations are typically going to be using non-Microsoft software (SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle) on non-Microsoft operating systems (Unix, Linux, or AS/400). And you can bet your next paycheck that the majority of them will be using Oracle or DB2 and not SQL Server (see Gartner Report).
The third thing to understand is that there is a large contingent of people who like to do things on the cheap (i.e., they don’t want to pay for Microsoft licensing). Representative of this would be the Open Source community, Academia, and small companies on a tight budget. Linux, Java, PHP, and MySQL rule as the key technologies in this area.
So what’s my point? I’m simply trying to say that as good as Microsoft’s technology is, it doesn’t meet every company’s need all of the time. There is a big need in corporate America for technical people who are diversified. You can definitely enhance your career by learning Microsoft as well as non-Microsoft technology. Next time we will consider some specifics on how you can enhance your career through diversification.
