Press coverage of another computer religious war.

Press coverage of another computer religious war.

[Michael D Shapiro]

In the August 26 Wall Street Journal, Walter S. Mossberg, in the weekly
"Personal Technology" wrote at the end of a column headed "Aging Mac
interface could learn tricks from Windows" (page B1), after describing
features that some prefer in Windows compared to the Mac:

    Most of these Windows features can be added to a Macintosh by
  obtaining extra software.  And some are deemed by Mac purists as
  unacceptable deviations from the user interface conventions espoused
  by Apple since 1984, guidelines that have taken on the rigid
  religious authority of papal encyclicals or Talmudic rulings in some
  quarters.  But Apple engineers have begun to rethink the Mac's user
  interface.  If that effort is to succeed, they can't indulge in the
  kind of not-invented-here mentality that is the luxury of
  theologians, not business people.

Some of this conclusion echoes familiarly to me, with the substitution
of only a few nouns.