Just saw a post on a Microsoft evangelist's blog that reminded me (however tangentially) of something that I've oft mulled over - bias, both conscious and subconscious, and how it manipulates the things we say and the image we try to present to the world (and conversely the image the world sees when they look at us, which leads the cynical reader be to cry "Hidden Agenda!" in response to seemingly innocent posts).

To draw from example, I was long a resident of a particularly cliquish online community - one where pretty much all of the members were software developers (or working in related disciplines). We'd often argue about industry trends and technologies, debate the merits of various nefarious corporations, and so on. Good conversation, and I gained a lot of wisdom and knowledge from the often heated exchanges. I also got to see one particularly good example of bias, both real and perceived, on the exchange of information.

It began when one of the more moderate, well-spoken, and respected members - someone whose voice carried great weight by a long history of wisdom, and whose real identity was unknown to most - announced that he had been hired by a new employer. An employer who he would reveal shortly after the details firmed up. I emailed him my guess, and learned that I was right: The new employer was Microsoft.

I believed that I knew who their new employer was by the marked shift in bias he showed towards Microsoft in the prior two weeks (while the offer was firming up): Suddenly, it seemed, this individual was more accepting of historical Microsoft practices, more derogatory towards Google, more disparaging towards web application, and had an increased preference for fat clients. Lots of people entirely unassociated with Microsoft hold these sorts of positions, but it was the change in position that was so notable to me. Maybe it was just a lucky guess and I was just imagining a change in position: To this day the person in question claims that their persona and positions didn't change. I actually believe them, in that I believe that they didn't intentionally or knowingly change their opinions, but their new alignment towards Microsoft most certainly did have an impact at a subconscious level, gently pushing their opinions in favour of Microsoft.

In any case, once this person's new employer became public knowledge in the community, they found that their input on technology matters was often dismissed by cynics as having no credible value. To a small degree the cynics were right - It was impossible, short of some sort of hypnosis, for this newly minted Microsoft employee to weigh in on matters that in any way concerned Microsoft's interests without consciously worrying about someone at Corporate Headquarters seeing their comment and it hurting (or alternately failing to help) their career, or on a deeper, more insidious level - their subconscious - feeling the need to offer up goodness towards Microsoft in kind for a paycheck.

Of course this sort of bias doesn't even require you to be an employee. One of the most difficult to stomach personalities in this industry is the Desperate-To-Be-A-Microsoft-Employee. This sort of person is driven to fight for Microsoft to the ends of the Earth, to clumsily adopt and champion every bowel movement Microsoft squeezes out, and to coddle up to every appendage of Microsoft (Scoble has a lot of these fawning admirers. He also has a lot of well-deserved admirers, but if you ever witness a thread where someone criticizes Scoble, watch for the sacrificial Scoble defenders to ooze out of the DIV tags, desperately hoping that someone at the Microsoft collective writes down their name and sends them an offer). These people, falling back to basic human psychology, at least subconsciously believe that if they send sweet love Microsoft's way then they'll get some in return, and the result is messy for everyone.

Even if you aren't a Microsoft employee, and you have no interest in ever being one (for me it really isn't an option, as the Canadian operation is almost entirely sales, or pseudo-sales, and I plan on staying in this country outside of an extraordinary opportunity), if you've invested a lot of time and effort into the Windows platform then you will still likely have a bias to defend the platform, and to deride threats to it. Earlier in my career, perhaps when I had a more narrow range of skills, I found myself falling prey to exactly this motivation quite a few times. I felt it necessary to defend Microsoft and attack its competitors in some sort of perverted belief that I was helping to maintain the status quo, ensuring that my knowledge and status weren't being threatened. You can see this sort of status quo bias all the time, with the mainframe guys deriding desktops, DB2 guys endlessly (and falsely) criticizing SQL Server, and so on. A lot of the noise masquerading as debates out there are founded on this motivation, just as most of the political grandstanding following Hurricane Katrina was partisan, biased noise, with every participant taking exactly the position one could have predicted months before.

While I've picked on Microsoft a lot, it just happens to be one of the easier examples, but the same sort of forces exist in a lot of spheres. For instance the tech world is awash with Google-Love right now, with every hopeful Google candidate flooding the boards with pro-Google rhetoric at every chance. While Google is undoubtedly a technical superstar that is executing ideas absolutely brilliantly, it is remarkable seeing such admiration for what is essentially an internet advertising company. Where was the love for DoubleClick?

The point that I'm trying to make in this rashly authored entry is quite simply that bias is enormously pervasive, and should never be underestimated. It drives almost everything we "believe" and say. It is often a destructive noise that thwarts rational and critical analysis and thought.

A peer was commenting about open offices (e.g. large areas with several work areas) versus cubicles, and what the advantages/disadvantages of each holds for software development. While this is painfully obvious, it suddenly struck me that cubicles allow you to jam people even closer together - without the barriers of partition walls, natural psychological "bubbles" would prevent one from packing employees as closely. Put a little superficial wall and you can jam people right up beside and afront each other, within arms reach in many cases.

I've worked in both (RBC, in particular, had an absolutely terrible work environment for all but senior management. Tiny little micro-cubicals about 4 feet deep with your back against heavily trafficked corridors: Combine the worst of both cubicles and open offices. Add in the sleep inducing din of the AC, overlaid with the rhythmic tapping of hundreds of people pecking away at their keyboard filling out their TPS Reports, and you have a creativeless, life-sucking environment where the intelligent part of your brain goes to die), along with of course private offices, and I definitely prefer the former if a private office isn't possible.

While I'm currently a Mozilla Firefox user, I was a very satisfied user of Opera for some time, enjoying some of its superbly implemented innovations such as mouse gestures. The "downside" of Opera, and a large impediment to its adoption, was the browser-embedded banner ads if you didn't purchase a registration key (which few did, as relates back to a prior entry where I observed that the only widespread competitors to Microsoft on the Windows desktop are free-as-in-beer software. Opera costed a marginal amount of money, so like many other pieces of software in that situation it remained a fringe application despite its many competitive advantages).

Opera has apparently finally tossed in the towel in its quest to sell their application on its ample merit (check out the feature sheet - native SVG rendering, super fast and lightweight, highly standards compliant, integrated RSS - This is a top notch browser), and is now offering their superb browser for free, downloadable here. Presumably they're moving to more "modern" revenue techniques like pay support, and perhaps partner agreements.

Even if you don't make it your primary browser, you simply must give it a try on your favourite websites and evaluate it on merit. At the very least ensure that sites you develop work properly in Opera as well.

[Slashdot has a discussion regarding this. Additionally I should note that if Opera sees widespread adoption, which I highly doubt given the lack of competitive application "shopping" among the Windows userbase, it may prove my SVG is dead claim wrong]