Vendors Are From Mars, Users Venus

Computerworld - Have you ever wondered why some IT professionals choose to work on the vendor side of our business, while others prefer the customer side? Most IT people make this decision early in their careers, and few reverse it. It's arguably the single most important fork in the working lives of most Computerworld readers, yet it's rarely discussed or even mentioned. Nevertheless, the motivations behind this initial decision tell us a lot about the dynamics of our industry.
It's no secret that IT suppliers and internal IT organizations often have very different cultures, and thus they tend to appeal to very different sets of IT professionals, consciously or subconsciously. My firm has recently been doing a lot of psychographic work on IT executives, and the results are pretty clear. Vendor executives are more oriented toward competition, sales, ownership and compensation. CIOs and other internal IT executives are typically more concerned with softer rewards such as knowledge, achievement and collaboration.
In many ways, this is as it should be. CIOs and other internal IT professionals don't fully control their own destinies and need to get along with their business colleagues if they are to succeed. There isn't a lot of room for renegades, because there isn't a lot of room for forming start-ups or demonstrating other forms of independent behavior. The most prestigious jobs tend to be in large companies, where being politic is essential.
The contrasts with the vendor world couldn't be more stark. When the young Bill Gates decided to drop out of Harvard, I doubt he spent much time debating whether to start Microsoft or join, for example, Citibank and become an early PC evangelist. Ditto for the scores of other IT entrepreneurs who have thrived on the vendor side and never spent a day in the customer world. They wanted the freedom to do their own thing and pursue their own dreams.
If all this seems a bit mundane, consider that few other industries seem to work this way. In what other sector do people of comparable expertise make such a fundamental career split, and do it in roughly equal numbers? It would be like having half of all doctors going to work for medical supply companies. While the split between accountants who work in-house and those at external accounting firms might seem to be another example, that situation has more to do with two types of employers competing for resources than it is about two entirely different ways of making a living.
The ramifications of all of