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Big Company on Campus
Daniel Dvorkin writes "MSNBC (oh, the irony) is running a scary article entitled Microsoft's big role on campus, detailing how Microsoft is working its way into academic computer science through a combination of bribery and propaganda. The aricle may be overstating the case, but it does make it sound as though MS products are displacing others at a disturbing rate in computer science departments. Given that academic computing has traditionally been both the source of and the stronghold for innovative software, this is a disturbing long-term trend."
Fundings funding. If they want to give my alma mater 1.6 million to use Windows, I think that's just great.
Computer Science isnt "how to use your computer". The concepts and techniques you learn are beyond any operating system. Good algorithm design and analysis transcends linux vs windows vs mac osx.
When I did my degree, half the classes used Windows, the other half linux, and now, a few years later, I really cant remember which was which.
It was irrelevant, I wasnt learning computers, or even how to program in C, I was learning concepts.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Round here at the big state-run universities (Cairo U, etc.) you can get legal copies of Windows, Office, and Visual Studio for the total of around 25 egyptian pounds, or around 4 or 5 US dollars.
That is, of course, breathtakingly shocking. But then, it is common knowledge that the IT ministry is in cahoots with MS.
Offtopic, but is 'campuses' the right plural for campus, or would that be campii, or something?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
(Damn, the phone rang. I could have had first post on a red-meat Micro$oft story!)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
a few years a go while i attened the university of southern california, i was surprised to find out that the UI design class in java i signed up for was now a introduction to MFC programming class.
the announcement my professor made show'ed she wasnt terribly happy with this. In addition every student in the class recieved a copy of windows NT professional and Visual Studio. This really stank for me, as a linux user, it meant that I had to work in the computer labs on campus.
In addition to the cut throat competition style bribes to the students, they also gave the computer department thousands and thousands of dollars that year. of course, one third of the sun machines were then replaced with dells...
the article is not over-reacting. How can we stop this? I think universities are lured by money, but are even more scared of losing cred. We as a developer community should loudly and publicly question the academic virtue of schools who whore themselves and their students out like this.
--------------------- Turn evil by smiling.
The "William H. Gates" building at MIT, part of their new computer science complex, was paid for by a certain individual whose name appears on the building. Additionally, Microsoft funds a great amount of "research" around campus, giving undergrads the opportunity to work for Microsoft at $7.50/hour.
Don't feel like paying an employee? Pay a school and get students to do it instead!
Needless to say, I'm bitter about "Microsoft presents 'College Education.'"
-agent oranje.
Also, I noticed they switched from borland to visual C++ to teach programming courses during my stay at the college. Instead I went on to get a double major in German and International business and taught myself PERL, PHP, MySQL, Linux, FreeBSD, DNS/BIND. It was scary that I knew more about databases than the CIS majors in the database programming class. I would ask simple questions about joins and other things and get a blank stare in return. The instructor was teaching them how to use Access for 90% of their work and had about one chapter over MSSQL. Most didn't even know what SQL even was let alone why it may just be important to know in the business world. I mean every other database package, except for Access, can use "SELECT * FROM table_name". Is SQL that hard to learn if one understands the theory of programming? No, not really, but I had already learned enough to be dangous. Did I know all the absolute nitty, gritty details of what queries would run the fastest and all that, no, but neither did the CIS students.
With my International Business degree and German I ended up working for a great little start-up firm that now is making about $500k in revenue and growing and hold the title of VP/IT Director and trying to get Linux on more than just our webservers and suceeding and my pay is proably more than what most are making as jr. level coders.
One thing I did notice when I spent a semester in Germany was that the German fochhochschule had two computer labs, one with XP, the other SuSE Linux. People were becoming familar with both MS Office and Star/Open Office.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Professors are cheap and the price is dropping.
Textbook sales are another good example of the professor and business. When the prefessor, or department, can dictate the purchase of thousands of dollars in books, you can be certain that there is a great deal of schmoozing going along with the sale. If you want your $100 a pop textbook to be accepted by a major university, you better be prepared to roll out a red carpet for the decision makers.
A friend of mine works for a major, highly-respected publisher of computer texts. She mentioned a while back that Microsoft is giving them so much money to write and publish their .NET line of books that the publisher has no financial risk when adding .NET books to it's list of titles. These new titles are both general consumption .NET books and CS texts for universities. They can be produced at a higher quality and sold at a lower price than books on non-MS subjects. Just another part of the general strategy to choke off Linux and Java's air supply by having CS graduates coming out of schools trained in Windows/.NET instead of Linux/Java.
For example, our local community college requires that every student take a course entitled "Intro to Information Management Systems." This course, with such a lofty title, teaches students the following:
I asked the professor why they require everyone to take this stuff. The reason he gave is that they were asked to do so by the local business community (Chamber of Commerce and the like.)
You can blame Microsoft for infesting CS departments, but schools like to believe they provide a service to the community, and the community asks for Microsoft. Don't like it, send a letter to your local schools from your business asking them to use the tools your business uses in teaching their students.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Actually, if your University (like mine, unfortunately) has a Campus Software Agreement, it's actually not cheap. You pay for it semester after semester, whether or not you actually use all of the Microsoft software (to the tune of several million per year ($10 million / 50 thousand applicable people == 200 per year per person (you pay for this in your campus privilege fees). If someone has exact numbers on the cost of a Campus Agreement, please post!). Not only that, but a previous version is required. Therefore, if you buy a new PC, you're unlikely to actually be able to use the new version (because you already have it, as required of the OEM by Microsoft). If you do end up going down to buy a copy from your uni, you most likely don't need a new version; your old one would likely have kept you just fine (how many are still using Windows 98 with Office 97?), so you're actually shelling out quite a bit for software you either don't need or wouldn't buy ordinarily.
Indeed, you're actually paying several times ($1000-2000?) what you would ordinarily be paying.
Microsoft, of course, loves this. You (myself included!) feel like you're not getting your money's worth if you don't go down and stock up on software you're already paying for. On top of that, you're spamming friends and relatives with the latest versions of MS Office, Windows Media Player, and requesting software for their latest version. You're becoming a vital cog in their upgrade treadmill and are more effectively advertising Microsoft than their marketing department could(!), and you're paying for the privilege of helping Microsoft!
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I have to side against all the anti-M$ people on this one. You're missing the point, and if you're out of college, you missed the point. There are two things you should be learning in college (besides how to drink), and those are how to think, and how to work.
As much as they might like to, Microsoft can't control how we think about abstract problems. If you learn about linked lists using Visual C++, vi and gcc, or pascal and EDT, you are STILL learning about linked lists.
However, it DOES matter what you get exposed to while you're learning the concepts. At my university, programming classes were taught on a VAX/VMS cluster, and on Sun workstations. Learning to code on the Suns gave me skills I use today in my job, where I program under linux. Using the VMS cluster gave me nightmares that will take decades to fade.
I worked for a little while doing Visual BASIC programming, and it wasn't that bad. I tried to learn Visual C++ while I was there, and it stumped me. I know C++. I don't know how to effectively use the interface for that beast, nor all the API calls that I'd use if I coded with it every day. Had I been able to do some of that at university, I'd have a better chance in the Real World (TM).
What most slashdotters forget in their rabid anti-Microsoft raving, is the ancient quote "Know thine enemy". I'd much rather know how to use all the "evil" M$ products, so I can clearly make cases for and against them when the opportunity arises, than to just chant "They're EVIL!" and hope they go away.
Besides, creativity will find a way. If you don't think there are pretty clever windows programmers out there, you haven't looked very hard. And linux would NEVER have become this popular without the M$-Empire to make it stand out.
In the CS department at UCLA, Microsoft has been around for a long time. On the first day of "Intro to Programming," every student got a brand-spankin-new, still shrink-wrapped box of MS Visual Studio 6.0.
Frankly this is brilliant marketing on Microsoft's part. When these students learn to program, they are now familiar and comfortable within VS. So what are they going to use later in life?
On the other hand, Microsoft is anything but pervasive in the CS labs. Probably about 50% of the machines have Windows only (but they all have Exceed on them also). About another 30% are Solaris, and the rest are Linux. Also, Microsoft products are free for engineering students, from Windows XP to BizTalk server. Even so, professors don't encourage Windows use--in fact most projects once you're out of the intro level are required to be done on UNIX or Linux.
I don't see this as as big a problem as it's being made out to be here. Windows will be shoved down everyone's throats no matter where they are. Smart people will still investigate all their options and made an educated decision.
--j
People who consider technical issues over making a quick buck do not rise to levels of significant decision making authority, neither in business nor in academia.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
i am a public school teacher and am finishing up a masters' in technology. you have no idea how microsoft makes it presence felt. they throw freebies to our district IT people. in college, our professors require work in either .doc or .ppt, and we get office for like $20.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Besides which, if you think that Microsoft ripping off Q-DOS to make MS-DOS and then copying Apple to make Windows is 'innovative' then I have a bridge that might be for sale...
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Quite true. When I was in school, we had several different computers: TRS-80s, Ti-994/As, Apple IIs, and maybe a PC somewhere. True, they weren't used to their full potential in that no one that I know of was doing any programming on them, but at least you got to see a variety of hardware running a variety of software. Now, you have Windows, Windows, Windows, and maybe a Mac somewhere in there. Kids are growing up knowing nothing but MS products, and MS likes it that way.
Where are the open source advocates in all this? Schools are strapped for cash, and this presents a wonderful opportunity to expose them to new things. My God, look at how much they can save if they switch to OpenOffice the next time they upgrade their office suites. How about having someone who would like to teach basic programming offer to teach students one or two days a week, maybe on a weekend. There may not be many students who'd volunteer to come in at those times, but the ones who do would be really interested. And it makes the school look damn good in the community. The volunteer teacher also benefits by getting a nice entry on their resume. And finally, the students benefit by not only getting a class that they might not otherwise have, but they're also exposed to something other than the same old MS software. And the open source movement benefits by getting additional exposure and a pool of future programmers. Everyone wins.
actually i work for a college and we pay 34 dollars per desktop for a bundle of xp/office/visio/and visual studio. this is changing in 2005 though. microsoft is dropping our educational discount. that's why we're heavily researching linux on the desktop. plus we're a novell shop so ximian desktop is going to look really good to us in 2005.
All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss. -Douglas Adams
If memory serves, the cost for each student was something like $50 per semester, or $5 per credit hour or something like that. This is in addition to the $5 per CD, so if you want WinXP it's $5 for the CD, VS.NET was $25 for the 5 CD's. Financially, it works out best for people about to graduate.
And at A&M the students voted it in. There was a referendum and everything. To put it in perspective, say it was a $5 per credit hour increase - we had just passed a $30 per credit hour fee increase and people raised bloody hell. I was even in charge of writing the code to select all the students "grandfathered" against that fee when they decided only to hand it to incoming freshmen and certian other students with this bizarre algorithm.
But at a major university, you've got to remember who's paying. Many of the kids are there on their parents' nickel, and they see anything on the bill as something they won't have to see or mess with. It's kinda the same mentality of paying for something with a credit card - anything that's not out of pocket is seen as "free" (no surprise then that credit card companies often target college students).
No, it's only the students that either have restrictive scholarships or are paying for everything themselves through financial aid or out of pocket that raise issues - and they're voted down by the majority of the students. Ultimately it boils down to college being expensive in any event.
But on the other side of the coin, to some degree we all know piracy is rampant on college campuses, and students instinct is not to go to free (as in GPL) software. Your parents buy you a Dell but it has XP Home and you need XP Pro to join a domain. No problem, find the guy with the XP Pro Corporate God edition to upgrade your system. Get Office XP Pro and VS.NET while you're at it (even though you're an English major and will never need VS.NET ever). Now Microsoft is offering you the opportunity to not be a dirty pirate for the low price of $5 a CD and some fees you'll never see because the bill goes to your folks.
So let's say you take 15 hours a semester - two semesters times $5 per credit hour is $150, plus a one-time $5 per CD fee. VS.NET alone is over a thousand dollars (though in all fairness not everyone needs it). By your numbers, you would have to be in college for over ten years to rack up $2000 in these MS fees.
Schnapple
Over the years UNIX has benefited greatly from the fact that Universities like Berkeley, MIT and Stanford published research because BSD was wide open. In 1996, when I was a grad student at Berkeley in CS, Microsoft approached the Profs at Berkeley with the source code for NT. The idea was that Berkeley would do research on NT. Amazingly enough the proposal was considered. Rumor was, and I don't know this for a fact, that the only reason the deal fell through is that while Microsoft was willing to release 100% of the source, they weren't willing to relenquish copyright. Derived worked would be owned by Microsoft, even when published. Berkeley said no.
It is interesting then that Microsoft wants research done on .NET.
This is just euphumism for buying cheap research. While $500 million dollars may seem a lot, its nothing compared to the 4 billion of internal expenditure. What are they getting for that 4 billion? My bet would be that if University profs and students start innovating on