In Indian languages there are these words that beautifully describe what I am trying to say. The nearest words in English language that I know are stooge and coterie.
First the words:
Chamcha or Chamacha -- literally meaning a spoon, it refers to the unnecessary noise created while washing a bunch of spoons together. Used both as noun and as a verb (Chamchagiri), it means sucking up to a person.
Balabaduka -- literally meaning "Tail Lifter" (to allow the beast to perform sexual functions), it refers to the insignificant people who follow a leader blindly, and live their lives for the benefit of the leader.
Bhabhdo -- the lowly brahmins who travel with Swamijis (Hindu holymen) attending to his human needs. They even wipe/wash the holy man after he takes a shit.
These days everywhere I am seeing Microsoft coterie, or friends of Microsoft. These people are champions of the Microsoft brand, Microsoft products, and everything MicroSofty. These are the people who bought Windows CE 1.0 handhelds rather than the Palms, waited for X-box (rather than PS2), and are now blowing their horns away in favor of the dot.net. They install new versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer every week, and ask others to do it promptly. For them, if Microsoft doesn't have it, you don't need it. They don't need AppServers (Microsoft doesn't have one, save the MTS for some other classification), didn't need cross-platform till dot-net, didn't need a CMS till Microsoft brought one, and don't need multi-user functionality.
Thou Art a Friend of Microsoft If..
- You subscribe to the free issues of .Net Magazine.
- The greatest debate for you is whether to learn C# or Visual Bob.
- You won't fire anybody because they bought Microsoft.
- "What is Linux?"
- You don't make such a big deal about a rebooting a computer. Afterall, it just takes a minute.
- If someone points out something that cannot be done with Microsoft technology (like computing the height and width of an image on the fly), you snap "Whachya wanna do that for?!"
- Thank God, you are not using the vi editor!
- "What are pipes? What is CGI?"
- "We should reward Microsoft for their success, not punish them for their monopoly"
- Only after a new iteration of Microsoft technology is released, that the flaws of the old version become obvious to you.
- Your benchmarks are always against yet another Microsoft product! (like comparing the speed of ADO with ADO+)
