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Will CS Students Switch From Microsoft?
spotter writes: "There's an article in Newsweek International that talks about how Microsoft's tactics are turning off an entire generation of CS students from their products and increasing the fortunes of Linux." The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
I don't know how it is at most other places, but at the University I attend the labs run NetBSD and KDE2.
I know a few people have copies of MS Visual Studio at home, but why bother, when gcc + emacs is in the labs and you can get it free at home?
Cheers Koz
An entire generation of CS students,
.NET out there,
.NET are different animals..
(and lots of non-CS students) are learning Java.
MS is going to need to do some serious marketing
towards universites to get
and personally, I doubt it'll ever reach the level of adoption that Java as achived.
(Yeah, before you start flaming me, I KNOW Java and
but they ARE competing technologies in some senses.)
The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
I'm not at all convinced this is true. A good counter-example is Apple, who for years owned the educational market both in high schools and universities in the US. It didn't lead (as Apple had hoped it would) to widespread use of Macs in the commercial world.
A good Computer Science school teaches the principles of computing. These are abstract ideas that can be applied to any hardware or software platform. The OS you use at university should not impact the OSes you are able or interested to use later. I learnt on Unix and VMS systems, neither of which I use in my professional or hobbyist life now.
Sailing over the event horizon
What I've never understood about Microsoft is why they don't have licenses that give people the opportunity to learn their product. In doing this they are shutting out a huge number of developers (not just students).
Whether you're in school or not, learning about developing in a Microsoft environment requires parting with some cash. Personally I'd love to have copies of Microsoft development tools just so I can learn about the technology, but I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a product just to try it out.
I'll pay media cost, but nothing more. Until they offer that I continue to use other tools and environments for "recreational development". I'd like to learn more about their technology, but they apparently don't want that to happen.
What ends up making the big difference will be if CS students who love their Linux (bless em) get into senior management positions in fortune 500 companies....
Oh, and this "If I made a great product, and Microsoft offered me a lot of money, I would spit in their faces," says Brett Slatkin, a student at Columbia University in New York. His colleagues roll their eyes and accuse him of being stuck at the "hippy stage."
Can anyone honestly say that if M$ offered them financial security for your work, you would really turn them down? Just think of all the good you could do with that money. That good is worth more than your silly M$ hate...
When I was a CS student back at college, I found that within the major, there was a small subset for which computers and programming were more than just a way to make money, and that these individuals were more knowledgeable of what was actually going on in the forefront of technology, not to mention the politics, news and "in" things of the computer field.
Whether or not they agreed with Microsoft, they at least were pretty up on the state of the industry.
The majority of students there, however, were only there because they'd heard that programming was a quick way to get a good paying job, and really were only "9 to 5" students in the field. They didn't care who or what license anything was written in, couldn't care less about what loss of rights were being discussed on Slashdot, nor even with anything other than getting drunk, and that fat paycheck they figured on when they got out.
Add to this the fact that, while expensive software on the outside world, Microsoft will give you their operating system, programming tools and office products for close to a song if you're a college student, and I'd say that the vast majority of the "average" CS student isn't any more clued in than the average home computer user.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Apple's a perfect example of this. Just because they got University's to buy a lot of boxes didn't make it ripe for students to learn on them.
I was starting college in 1985 and these hot new Macintoshs had just hit the computer lab. They were a dream compared to hacking away on the mainframe with it's handout's of push the PF75 key, blah blah blah. So as a budding young programmer I thought the Mac was the future. I wanted to learn to program it. They had an interpreted C on them that I used, but you really couldn't do much fancy with it. I wanted to go deeper. Turned out you had to buy about $1500 bucks worth of books, compilers and official Mac developer license to really get into the nuts and bolts.
I found a PC in the EE lab. It was wide open. Didn't really have windows, but a C compiler was cheap and the specifications for it were lying around all over the place. I could easily solder something together and have it communicate on the main bus. It didn't have all the expense and proprietary restrictions of the Mac. Had a built in assembly level debugger even. It was a hackers dream-- wide open and pokeable. It was not a great box, but it was cheap and available and easy to get internal information about.
Guess what I learned and pursued on into my career. Guess what type of hardware I'm typing from now. An Intel box that gained popularity along with Microsoft.
The tighter Bill squeezes his claws the more systems that will slip through his fingers. (to paraphrase the wisdom of Star Wars). He will fall the way of Apple.
You're right about a good CS department. A really good one doesn't even teach languages, it should stick to concepts. Languages are just a means to an end.
Shawn
P.S. I quickly got sick of MS boxes and went to work in UNIX. At least UNIX/Linux doesn't crash all the time.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
I attend one of the largest universities in the U.S. (and indeed the world) and over the past three years or so, Microsoft has been very busy blitzing our entire school and IEEE and ACM organizations with advertisements, promotions, donations, ... the whole hundred yards. So much of our computing tools (both software and *hardware*) are provided by them. ISOs for XP, Visual Studio, etc. are provided to all of our CS faculty and students freely. On the surface, this seems very good and positive, except that they have an ulterior and very selfish motive - to get the entire next generation our CS students hooked on their proprietary and frequently restrictive and intrusive products, and start developing for their platform thereby strenthening their stranglehold on the industry. Instead of these students to first be exposed and learn to use the openly specified, standardized and frequently free tools, and then later on moving onto any platforms they prefer, all they hear and learn about now is Microsoft (which was never the case until Microsoft became this rich and powerful). I hate to say it, but Microsoft sure knows what they need to do to maintain their monopoly, and they are doing it to the fullest. And the scheme is proving to be fruitful. Over the years (as those "donations" have come), I have seen our CS department in particular and our entire engineering college in general switch slowly but steadily from Unix boxes to PCs (even where we needed the power of the Unix workstations), from Unix to Windows (even where development was traditionally taught in Unix first, everything else later), from Linux PCs to Windows PCs (even though the former were free and simpler to implement and maintain in a multi-user development environment), from gcc to Visual C++ (simply because it has a nice interface and debugger, and MS provided it ->f-reely, the Freedom of gcc notwithstanding)... The list goes on and on. The prognosis, for my school anyway, seems bleak as we move more and more to "the dark side" and increasingly trap ourselves into a world where everything is proprietary, and we only promote the power of the most powerful global corporations at the expense of open, collaborative, community development.
I called up Microsoft, was incredibly rude to the person on the phone.
Congratulations, you pissed on some guy in a call center who's making $8-10/hr. Not only that, but you have had zero effect on the actual problem.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
NOT....
I have an autopc.. I wanted to learn a bit about it...
buy VC++ 6.0 Professional $1300.00
buy the Windows CE dev kit $600.00
download the "free" autopc dev kit.
and everyone stands around wondering why the autopc specification that microsoft touted as world changing died a horrible miserable death. because the large bulk of developers out there cant afford $1900.00 to mess with it.
Microsoft tempts you with freebies, that require expensive add-on's or require the "professional" version of the dev studio and will not work with the regular or educational versions intentionally (it's programmed in! it doesn't need professional for the dev kit but the buttwipe programmers locked it to check every time.)
Sorry, if MS wants people to embrace their ideas.. make it FREE or cheap for me to get into it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
... doesn't mean you shouldn't learn it.
Regarding topics addressed in the parent post:
1. Yes, Microsoft products are made such that easy tasks are simple, yet complicated setups are still complicated. They put a lot of money into making things generally easy for most people, and although I don't always agree with their choices, I find myself "up and running" quickly with any Windows OS. Mac systems I find to be similarly easy, but more restrictive at times. Unix-based systems... well, it takes a while longer and a lot more effort to get baseline functionality in place. And if you don't know what you're doing, the learning curve is huge and you go through a lot of frustration. Anything requiring reading more than two paragraphs of documentation to get working is harder than what I'm typically used to.
That said, when you're trying to set up complex networks and complicated hardware setups, Windows can be as painful as Unix. But I don't blame them for making a "network wizard" - the target audience is too small, too smart, and needs too much flexibility for MS to really attack those kind of things like they did with simple dial-up networking or playing music files on a typical sound setup. Also, because they left most of the flexibility there, I have as many options as I can afford or comprehend. It's up to 3rd party vendors (software and hardware) to make their own products easy to use, flexible, powerful, cheap, etc. (Whatever market they're targeting)
2. Back to the main topic of CS and MSFT - I agree with the concept of "it's present, real, and you will run into it in the field".
I find it to be irritating when CS departments want to stick to Unix-only programming, just because there's a wide variety of systems out there that students may run into. I went through 4 years of college and, because I never got involved in any non-school projects (I had many problems with staying in-focus with school assignments and had to put extra time into that), I NEVER did a single CS assignment on anything but Solaris. This is just as bad as doing everything in Visual Studio... it's one company's product with one company's vision of how things should be. I may have learned many general concepts, but I won't know for a while just how much of what I learned was tied down to that particular OS or the specific products we used on our systems.
Furthermore, a lot can be said of practical programming experience... and I believe that flexibilty and adaptability among computer systems is as desirable a concept to learn in CS as are program organization and programming paradigms. Yes, we don't want to teach a generation how just to use MS products because they're 90% of the market... but we don't want them to learn only Java, only Scheme, etc...
As it turns out, there are universities out there that don't stick to only MS products for teaching, and that's good. However, many of these same universities are sticking only to teaching on one of the other systems available, and that's a very bad thing. You could say at least one thing about sticking to MS products: it may not be a good teaching philosophy in general, but if you're going to be stubborn and political, sticking with 80-90% of what's used out there is better than sticking with something that's only 5%.