Drinking the Kool-Aid: a new idiom

[AAllan at AOL.COM]

This term is new to me. Perhaps already familiar to collectors of
cyber-vocabulary. - Allan Metcalf

>From the LinguaFranca website:
http://www.linguafranca.com/0007/inside-webcast.html

ON MARCH 14, horror novelist Stephen King jump-started electronic trade-book
publishing. He released a sixty-six-page novella on the World Wide Web, and
twenty-four hours later almost half a million fans had downloaded it. What
King did for horror, Princeton University history professor Robert Darnton
now hopes to do for the academic monograph.
  . . .
   But Darnton has been drinking the Kool-Aid, as they say in the new-media
business. He has become a true believer in the Internet's potential to
transform academic publishing -- by helping university presses publish more
monographs and maybe even by enabling scholars to produce  better history.
----------
I found that "Red Herring" magazine has a trademarked column "Drinking the
Kool-Aid" by Jason Pontin.

Here's another example, by Joe Barr in Linux World:
http://linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-05/lw-05-vcontrol.html
In short, Microsoft memes are finding fewer and fewer susceptible hosts.
People are no longer buying the snake oil or drinking the Kool Aid as readily
as they once did.

And here's an explanation from
http://www.macmilitia.com/trenches/012700.shtml

 Digital Handcuffs?

 By Dan Litwiller, 1-27-2000

                               One of my first tasks after emigrating to the
Macintosh platform was to convert twelve years' worth of documents into
formats accessible to Mac applications. I prepared carefully for the job.
Unsure of which would work best, I saved each document in several formats. I
also kept the Windows-mode originals, and created HTML versions as an "if all
else fails" precaution.
. . .
Still, it was a tedious process that I was glad to finish. Like all such
tasks, the conversion's manual, repetitive activity left me free to ponder
its necessity.
 . . .
                               Drinking the Kool-Aid®

       The pain of exchanging documents between different applications is the
driving force behind most businesses declaring a company standard that
everyone must use. Once that standard is established, it's nearly impossible
to displace. Managers usually seem to pick the weakest possible applications
for their "standards," and justify them as "business decisions," but that's
for next week's column.
      Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), most
businesses see little need to convert to different applications or standards.
Whether they're truly getting things done with their current systems is
immaterial. The processes and habits are in place, working, and everyone is
used to them.
 In one company I worked for, we referred to this situation as "Drinking the
Kool-Aid". Whenever new people came on staff, they inevitably questioned how
things were done, and challenged the inefficiencies the established workers
used every day. They started with polite questions, and became more strident
as their frustration increased. Only when they accepted the status quo, and
realized that their logic and fury would never break through management's
protective barriers did they accept their situation and buckle down like the
rest of us. The adjustment process took longer for some, but in the end, the
Kool-Aid did its job.