In Canada, the government itself is one of the worst offenders in this type of behaviour (though there are laws to try to prevent it). In some ways when governments enable this kind of culture of waste, the ethical questions become more intense, because it's one thing for a private company to waste its shareholder money, and quite another for taxpayer dollars to be wasted.

What I find more disturbing than when marketing gurus or executives try to impose an option, though, is when IT leaders do it. It seems like neither spend enough time thinking about the productivity and usability factors, and in some cases one solution is as bad as the other.

Case in point, a former client moved to Linux because their new IT guru decided it would be so. There's nothing wrong with such a move, at any level, except that in their case it was done within about 8 weeks, and at every workstation. It ended up crippling them for about 6 months, because their productivity dropped as users struggled, and some back-end support tools staggered to run in the new environments. Like with all these ethically-challenged moves, the reason for making the changes was personal fervor, and it blinded the decision-maker to the risks.

Maybe when the rubber hits the road, what we're talking about isn't unethical behaviour at all, though, but just old-fashioned stupidity?