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Are Colleges Helping to Maintain the Microsoft Monopoly?
lexus99 asks: "Recently, while attending college and wanting to take tests in order to avoid taking basic computer courses, I have signed up for a few SAM (Skills Assessment Manager) tests. What really surprised me is that these tests are entirely based upon Microsoft products (Windows XP and Office XP). Note that this course is -required- before taking any any of the more advanced courses. Is this not a clear cut case of U.S. Colleges forcing its students to exclusively use Microsoft's software? Does Microsoft pay for this 'privledge', or do the schools get some type of M$ discounts? I don't believe that I will have any problem passing these tests, as I frequently use M$ software in my workplace, but I cannot help but feel insulted that I have to take them in order to take more advanced UNIX courses." This issue is a lot more complex than it sounds. Many colleges fall into Microsoft's software because they do get decent volume discounts and Microsoft provides them with decent service, so why change what works? However, with the new licensing schemes that Microsoft is beginning to push, maybe we'll see some change in this area in the near future. Have any of you seen evidence of Microsoft worming it's way into your college courses?
I go to University of Texas at Arlington, and we have similar requirements here called Computer User Profeciency. Everyone is required to take it and demonstrate basic skills in Word processing and spreadsheets (also internet and e-mail). The tests occur on MS products, simply because that's what 90% of the world uses. However, they keep the tests as general as possible, and anyone who uses KOffice, the Gnome suite, or Open Office can do fine.
I believe the root of this question lays in a general education requirements that a number of colleges/universities.
Lets say a university wants to employ a basic computing skills class for the general education requirements. So, you make a CS101 class. But, how do you create a lesson plan for this class? How do you teach word processing on a computer that's inexpensive from installation to support? Not to mention having the attempt for the class material to be applicable in the lives of the student.
As much as I would like to see a more competitive/open environment, the open source products of word processing and operating systems in general are not at that level yet, and certainly not in the past 10+ years. The only real player has been Microsoft with Corel/WordPerfect in a very distant 2nd.
At this point in time it makes economical and educational sense to go with MS products. However, this could change if a number of things happen, which I personally would like to see.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
" I get all my work done with vim in a console. I am by no means even a power *NIX user, and it concerns me that I get the feeling that they think I'm doing something they couldn't do."
(I'm quoting a post but not replying to it, because this is on a different topic, but Im quoting for relevance)
It's sad to see them teach students how to use a product, instead of how to use the language.
I think they should spend the first month on enviroments, 2 weeks to learn vc++, a few days on pico, a week and some change on vi(only the basic movement/insertion/deletion, stuff vimtutor would show), and the rest on all the fun gcc options. Then the students would be able to code in most standard enviroments, and the rest of the time should be spent teaching the kids the actual language. The teacher shouldnt even care what editor you use, as long as you turn in working code.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The web classes have a similar approach. They teach outdated 1996ish table-based and pixel-based HTML for Exploiter and Netscape 4.x, and don't give a fuck about standards and more legitimate web techniques. The WIN-DOS labs have Internet Exploiter 5 and Netscape Communicator 4.79. Mozilla is not known, and they really don't care about the Mozilla-based Netscape 7.
Well, in all fairness, the purpose of those classes is to reflect the real world, right? For the same reason that you rightfully complain about teaching a graphics class with Corel PhotoPaint, it would be kind of silly to teach a web class with Mozilla. Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 4 (on both Windows and Mac) represent the vast majority of web clients out there. (There's a significant fraction of IE 6 for Windows, too, but I understand that it's pretty much bug-for-bug compatible with IE 5, so it doesn't really count.)
I'm this close --><-- to launching into a rant about how Mozilla would be a much more useful browser if it had been written to be fully compatible with the various quirks of IE 5 as well as all those new-fangled standards that lots of people talk about but hardly anyone uses. This is neither the time or the place for it, so I'll abstain. But it's there, just below the surface, and it would be dishonest of me to try to hide it.
I write in my journal
Universities have been promoting Unix for many years and prior to Linux were probably the single most important factor keeping it alive.
Just as Unix and its derivatives have played a prominent role in industry on the server, MS OS's obviously have played a prominent role on the desktop. If a university wants to prepare students for the real world, it needs to include all the most important OS's, languages, etc. Instructors should point out the strengths and weaknesses of each and let the students draw their own conclusions.
The quirks are not simply quirks. They are Flat-Out-Absolutely-Wrong implimentations of web standards. There are more than a few web browsers out there: Opera, Mozilla (phoenix, chimera, k-meleon), Omniweb, Konqueror, even Links (lynx does not parse CSS). All of them, except IE5 and IE6 (and only on Windows... IE5:mac is correct), calculate css width, margins, border, and padding the exact same way. IE[5,6]:Win, however, conclude that border and padding are included in width, in direct literal contradiction with the CSS1 and CSS2 W3C recomendations.
Quirks like that I do not want to see Mozilla adopt. It's incorrect, and it doesn't even make sense to do it that way, unless you include margins, which is impossible because of the way margin-top and margin-bottom interact. It'd be a quirk if there weren't a spec. IE is, however, wrong, and there are ten other implimentations of the same standard that prove it.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
People really do need to be able to work with Windows. Sure, unices may be better operating systems at the technical level and it's endearing that you're rooting for the underdog, but Windows is what is out there. When Unix is running on a significant percentage of home computers and a larger percentage of office machines, universities will be teaching that. They're teaching what's useful, it has nothing to do with Microsoft playing Big Brother.
Any "Educator" who teaches a programming classes and requires a specific compiler is an incompetent idiot and you should not believe a word he says.
I'm not sure I care for your tone, and I certainly don't agree with what you have to say.
Can we agree, for sake of discussion, that it's impossible to teach a programming language without letting the students get in there and program with it? I mean, you can read K&R from start to finish as many times as you like, but you need practical experience writing programs, screwing them up, and fixing them to really understand the language.
So in order to learn, students have to program. And, obviously, their efforts have to be evaluated by the teacher, right? So it's not just a student sitting at his desk writing programs, and compiling and running them, all by himself. There's a feedback loop, and the teacher is an important part of it.
Students in an introductory class are there to learn a language, or an API, or a set of basic concepts. They're not there to learn how to use a particular editor, or compiler, or debugger. The tools they need to use are just... necessary evils, I guess. You can't compile without a compiler, but using the compiler is secondary to your purpose. So the tools-- the editor, compiler, debugger-- should get in the way as little as possible. If you're thinking about how to use the tool, you're not thinking about what you're really there to learn.
The same goes for the teacher. Nobody can be expert in every editor, every compiler, every debugger. If a student has a problem with one of his tools, the teacher needs to be able to get in there, solve the problem quickly, and get the student back on track. In order to do that, the teacher needs to be an expert on the tools used by the students, so he can spend as little time on them as possible.
You see, I think I disagree with you completely. A teacher is responsible for creating an environment in which students can learn what they came to learn, and a good teacher will do what it takes to make that happen. If that means telling the students to write their programs with Visual C++, then good for him.
So, in conclusion, I think the truth is almost the complete opposite of what you said. I think any educator who teaches a programming class and doesn't require each student to use the same compiler and platform probably isn't making a good enough effort to keep the students focused on the material at hand.
I write in my journal
Everything you said is true-- I assume. I won't bother fact-checking you, because the facts of your post aren't relevant.
Saying "IE does it wrong" is kind of like choosing only to speak Esperanto. You may be technically right, but your solution isn't a practical one.
I think Mozilla would be a more useful browser if it could render pages the same way IE renders them. This isn't the case now; pages that render perfectly well in IE fail to render correctly in Mozilla. (I'm too lazy to find an example for you; finding one for yourself shouldn't be difficult, if you're interested in trying.) If I'm looking at a page in Mozilla that doesn't render correctly, I can sit back in my chair and say to myself, with satisfaction, "Well, that's another web site that's written incorrectly. Shame on them!"
And then I close Mozilla and fire up IE, so I can see the page I was looking for. And, since there aren't really any pages that fail to render correctly in IE, I don't see much reason to ever go back to Mozilla. See, because in this example Mozilla has failed to perform its one and only function: rendering web pages.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: web standards are relevant only to the extent that they reflect the real world. If the page renders correctly in 90% of the world's browser instances, but is in violation of the standard, then it seems to me that the standard-- or at least an up-and-coming implementation of the standard-- needs to be reevaluated.
I write in my journal
Actually, he's saying that his tuition was inflated some $100 minimum to pay for that "deal."
There's no evidence of this. My girlfriend just graduated from a UT graduate school this past June; she'd been there since before the cheap-Windows-licensing program started. Her tuition didn't change in any meaningful way during her time there. There's no "Microsoft licensing spike" in the tuition curve.
I write in my journal
Preventing people from using other products by giving yours away for less than cost when you are a monopoly, is an abuse of monopoly power and illegal.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'll not dwell too long on this; Your analogy to Esperanto is flawed. Mozilla speak's the Queen's HTML/CSS/DOM/etc, while IE speaks a slang popularlized by MTV & friends. Those who understand the slang might not understand all your fancy words or be confused when you respond positively to a double negative, but you're speaking pure English.
I see you don't claim to be a web designer. A casual speaker of English wouldn't care at the misuse of a semicolon. A professional writer wishing to write to a casual audience might curse that he can't convey the exact meaning a semicolon would bring, because the causal audience wouldn't pick up on it. So he curses and writes longer sentences that everyone will grasp.
Web designers writing for the causal, apathetic, audience have to write so that IE understands. IE is the 7th-grade English level that novels need to be written for. IE doesn't understand what a comma splice is, but it understands "UR K-KOOL DUDE", even though "UR" should be "U R".
I see many pages that IE renders blatantly wrongly, but then, like most web designers, I've usually written those pages: The next 75% of my job is getting IE to display it the way my other 7-10 browsers do. Successful web designs are done this way because it is impossible to start with an IE-specific design and go to a design everyone can use.
Your last paragraph is curious. The standards are set, and people build implimentations off those standards. Because I impliment the standard in a sub-par way, but I market well, should the quality of the standard be lowered and invalidate the work of dozens of higher quality projects?
It has been a long time since I saw a web site Mozilla does not render properly, by the way. css/edge is one I usually point out when arguing for standards acceptance. These designs are beautiful and elegant, but fail in IE and old versions of Opera. These are simple things. This copy of the OGF's SRD demonstrates one of the simpler things IE just can't grasp.
Anyhow, I understand your run-with-mob perspective, but I don't believe it can apply rationally in this case. It's a quick step to communication lockdown if we allow our method of communication to be controlled entirely by a single corporate entity, whoever the hell they are.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
> he continued to allow any tools/language, but
> only 'supported' M$.
I can understand your complaining about his not allowing the use of non-Microsoft tools. Whining that he won't "support" them is another matter. What would you do, force the teacher to study all the other software tools on all the other platforms so he'd be ready to assist you with your particular flavor?
I'm not a huge fan of MS's business tactics, but you're going too far.
So basically what you're saying is that whoever has the most market deserves to make all the rules, regardless of anything else? What you're saying then, by implication, is that any company should do whatever it can to gain a monopoly, since it can then introduce new "features" that will prevent any competitors from releasing competing products.
For example, if microsoft decided to add a MagicRenderer that allowed a web developer to encrypt the actual HTML file so that the user never got to see the source code (i.e. via view source) -- I guess think of it as a precompiled web page -- and didn't share that info with anyone else, and developers started using that technology, then short of reverse engineering the MagicRenderer protocol, nobody else would ever be able to create a competing product.
If a page renders correctly on 90% of the browsers but is in violation of the standard, the standard does not need to be reevaluated - it needs to be enforced.
Ah yah! You miss the point. Completely. Educational facilities are supposed to be at the forefront of things, not a copy of the real world. Therefore, they should not teach the techniques of 1996 or today, but of tomorrow. And tomorrow we will, believe it or not, use mature software that can deal with standards across the board. At one point, when corporate interests say so, the boat will turn, and the students of today should be prepared for that very moment. Learning 1996ish HTML can be done at home in a few hours. We don't need to waste university resources for that.
I am again stressing the university attitudes when the web was in its infancy, when the first servers were installed and the students became the first to get involved in web design. This was a few years before it all spread to the masses. The colleges of today should be equally at the forefront, preparing students for what will come, not for what is.
frawaradaR anahaha islaginaR!
If 5% of your customers use a different browser than IE, and you want to get the most value from your website, create pages that work for both. Getting ROI from a website is hard enough without throwing away the opportunity to catch that 5% by making your pages compliant. If you spend money on your website to make it valuable to you and your customers, why not spend some extra $$$ to make it viewable by everyone. Other browsers do have a user base no matter that 95% use IE. That 5% is not going away. If you start designing standards compliant and then introduce browser specific variations as needed, it is much easier than designing a page against and quarky and moving implementation and then trying to make it work with another browser. Remember, the browsers are trying to implement the standards, so it makes more sense to start with the standards and alter them as necessary. Microsoft has stated its support for web standards, so each new version of its browser is going to be moving closer to web standards.
My $.02.
Well, you shouldn't teach to a product, but when it comes time to do the assignment, and there are only 1 or 2 TAs, busy with their own classes/research, it's far easier to grade upwards of 100 assignments if you don't have to try and find 7 types of computers/compilers to grade.
:)
At Northwestern, we alternate between needing Visual Studio and Linux, and I personally do all my dev on OS X and then take an hour to make sure it runs on whatever platform I need. It's worked fine the past 3 years
Josh
The marginal cost of copying software is damn near zero. When the development cost is amortized across several versions and related R&D or products, how do you decide whether the vendor is fairly recouping their cost or just poorly predicted the price elasticity of demand for it?
I attended a CS course for a while, after my ex .com job went down the drain and before I managed to find a new one. Also in Sweden. The CS course only used MS-products, with the exception of GCC under Windows.
When asked for feedback from the course organizers, me and a couple of other guys pointed this out with the main argument that the students weren't given broad, widely applicable knowledge, but rather product-specific knowledge. Didn't really seem like they cared. Then we mentioned how they probably could save around $200 US (2000 SEK) worth of licence costs per computer. And then suddenly they sounded VERY interrested. 8)
-- Black holes are, where God is dividing by zero.