"and by indirection find direction out."

By Paul Murphy, author of The Unix Guide to Defenestration

Shakespeare presents Polonius as a babbling old fool, and that is probably just what some of the other people in your IT department think of you. After all they out number you and, besides, you still believe in Unix while they're fully qualifed MSCEs; I mean, gee, isn't Unix so last millenium?

Not hardly, but you'll generally find it easier to meet and marry Alias girl than to convince a bunch of Wingots that the fundamental VMS ideas behind Windows 2003 Server predate those in Solaris 2.9 by about a decade. So when the next interesting project comes up there'll be quite a a lot of support for treating it as an opportunity to get the latest Windows server products on yet another rack full of PCs and not much for doing it on SPARC.

You could wait until the Windows project fails or is so far behind deadline the bosses get desperate and then hope to get asked to the dance, but there's a better strategy. Be helpful. Line up with the Wingots, support their hardware and licensing requests, contribute to project planning, and supportively implement a parallel system -for testing and prototyping only of course- on your Sun box.

If they're right and the Windows solution works for the organization - that's great: the organization gets a success and you have some new friends. Cool! but if you're right and the Windows solution starts to drag out, your new relationships with the key players will let Unix step in with something that, for a few hardware dollars and some code cleanup, can be made to work almost right away. Everybody participates in the success, you get a new Sun box, and you get to play good guy - what could be better than that?

Other than Alias girl, there is something better than that; and it's something Polonius would have approved of. Given the turn-over rate among Wingots, you can probably pull this off a half dozen times or more before anyone catches on!