Today I was thinking about some of the misunderstandings going around about software. Actually my life revolves around misunderstandings in every area of my life (not just my life in technology!) and I'm usually thinking about it in some respect. I can recall back to early 2004 when I was the black sheep in both the Microsoft AND Mozilla communities for promoting .NET *and* web standards. The Mozilla-ish (open-source) guys would mock the severe inefficiencies and painful security flaws of .NET (though they never ACTUALLY used .NET!) and the Microsoft-ish (.NET) guys would mock call me personally unrepeatable names for even suggesting that web developers should learn the foundational principles of JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML before they starting asking a load of "how do I..." questions. Now while the open-source community has wised up a bit, I still get extremely vile insults from the git-r-done areas .NET community where even mentioning proper development or training will get you killed. In any case, this is my life and like I say... not just in technology. Basically, everyone hates me :)

So, here's my concise (yeah like I'm capable of that) list of software that is EXTREMELY misunderstood. I'm not going to go into any detail except put a single line by the item which should give you a hint as to what the software really is. This is important: if you understand one of the confusions, that confusion is analogous to each of the others. For example, if you know how insane it is to compare SQL Server 2005 to MySQL then, guess what... you now understand why it's insane to compare Firefox to IE or LLBLGen Pro to .netTiers or NHibernate. You just can't do it! Yet, people all day long give me unjustifiable grief about this stuff and I am forced to spend literally 70% of my time in marketing instead of programming!

I'll shut up now... here's the list:

List of Extremely Misunderstood Software
}