You frame the three points a bit derogatory and seem to have missed the point of your customers.
> Windows was the OS that the company was also using for employee machines, so they knew it.
They understand it, have an idea about the cost and amount of support necessary. "They knew it" seems to convey that they were essentially stupid or not adventurous enough to try something else.
> The IT department only wanted Windows machines on their network
Again: a complete valid reason in my view. Here on this forum you have even people advocating that server and client in web apps should be written in the same language to keep things consistent.
> The customer was afraid of Mac OS X because they thought it would not be stable enough
You make that sound like there teeth were rattling in horror, but apparently failed to convince them that OSX would be stable enough?
I'm not a Windows developer or -user, indications that win 98 runs on my ATM also make me concerned.
But "muhaha, they are just stupid bricks for using windows" (no, you did not say that, but it sums the attitude) shows a lack of understanding and, as a consequence, does not advance the spread of alternatives into these environments IMO.
Sorry, that wasn't my attitude nor was I intending to sound that way. I fully understand why they'd rather use a Windows solution, I just wanted to explain in a simple way what I thought their motivations were.
> "They knew it" seems to convey that they were essentially stupid or not adventurous enough to try something else.
I did not intend to convey that they were stupid or not adventurous enough, I simply thought "knew it" would be a sufficient enough description. I did not intend "knew it" in a pejorative way at all.
> You make that sound like there teeth were rattling in horror
No, not really, actually I remember discussions with big companies where those were the exact words ("Our IT department is concerned with the stability of this Mac OS X")
> "muhaha, they are just stupid bricks for using windows
Again, no, I just tried to explain the seemingly irrational behaviour (for tech people) of choosing a technologically worse solution even though better solutions exists. I wasn't even talking about Windows actually, but about digital signage solutions based on Windows. I'd rather not go and open the box of pandora that is Windows <> Linux <> Mac OS X. Most of our competitors that ran on Windows (situation may have changed, I left that company more than 2 years ago) were on the feature side and in terms of possibilities worse than our solution (not only because it was easy to pull of a lot of things with Core Graphics really easy).
I really can't see where you read the "those people were stupid" attitude, but it may be a cultural difference, I'm not a native english speaker. Nevertheless, even if I sounded that way, it totally wasn't intended that way. If I were in a big (non-tech) company in such a situation, I might even decide in a similar way out of the above reasons.
So, from my 6yrs in SBC/AT&T, the OP is completely correct and I don't see anything insulting in his comment. That's exactly how they made decisions when I was there. It doesn't make them wrong per se, but that's how they functioned. In fact, I think OP was being nice. A lot nicer than the description I'd give.
I could type up 3 pages of my experience there, but I'll just say that because it was my first job: It took me 4 years to confidently identify the 3 points OP listed(that it wasn't me that had a problem), one more year of research for me to learn that living in the bay area put me in the middle of the tech-start-up scene that had a mindset like my own, and another year to replace all the expensive proprietary software tools on my resume with trendy open-source alternatives.... then I left.
I did not read that attitude from terhechte at all; I did not find the points "derogatory." To me, it seemed like terhechte has a good understanding of why his customers reacted how they did, and believed those reactions were reasonable.
> Windows was the OS that the company was also using for employee machines, so they knew it.
They understand it, have an idea about the cost and amount of support necessary. "They knew it" seems to convey that they were essentially stupid or not adventurous enough to try something else.
> The IT department only wanted Windows machines on their network
Again: a complete valid reason in my view. Here on this forum you have even people advocating that server and client in web apps should be written in the same language to keep things consistent.
> The customer was afraid of Mac OS X because they thought it would not be stable enough
You make that sound like there teeth were rattling in horror, but apparently failed to convince them that OSX would be stable enough?
I'm not a Windows developer or -user, indications that win 98 runs on my ATM also make me concerned.
But "muhaha, they are just stupid bricks for using windows" (no, you did not say that, but it sums the attitude) shows a lack of understanding and, as a consequence, does not advance the spread of alternatives into these environments IMO.