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IBM and Red Hat Offer College Prep
Califa writes "IBM announced Tuesday it will work with Red Hat to bring universities up to speed in teaching college students open source skills." From the article: "The company said its research of technology training at universities around the world have shown a need for more open-standards offerings. About 75 percent of a group of CEOs interviewed by IBM's Business Consulting Services said education and a lack of qualified candidates are the two issues with the greatest impact on their business."
At 13,000 people, they are bringing out the chainsaw, not the pruning shears.
Considering the majority of these 13,000 people are in Europe, I'm assuming IBM is getting rid of them because of their expense. The Euro has gone through the roof compared to the dollar, so even hiring Americans have become cheap in comparison. But, they'll probably replace these people by hiring in India.
Maybe a bit OT, but MIT has basically open sourced alot of thier stuff (pretty cool). MIT's OpenCourseWare
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
As much as your post was probably intended to be a "donate something free" joke, there's an element of truth in what you say.
I work for one of the big four Universities in Sydney, Australia and well, we got (and continue to be) royally screwed by these IBM 'donations'.
Let me put it clearly: There is NO donation, the equipment that IBM claim to donate is not free. The way IBM work on these deals is that they ponce about making announcements and press releases and say look look, we gave all these free computers to this University, aren't we good corporate citizens and on the other side, they're shoving exclusive access deals under the noses of the IT purchasing folks in the individual faculties that 'benefit' from the 'donations'.
Basically, what IBM really say is "agree to buy all of your IT infrastructure from us for the next n years, or the donation is off".
Since the big announcements have often already been made, you're trapped between a rock and a hard place.
From a technical administration and IT purchasing point of view in these instritutions, 'donation' is just IBM-speak for 'Pwn3d'.
Once IBM have pwn3d you, you're screwed. On simple factors: It takes me 10 working days to get a written quote out of IBM for a thinkpad. I can generate the same written quote for a Dell Lattitude online in minutes - Dell give me direct access to the corporate ordering system. It taks IBM six weeks to deliver a Thinkpad once I've ordered it, an equivalent Dell takes a maximum of ten days. If I call IBM for support, I get patched through to darkest India (this is large corporate support remember - I get better IBM support from google). Dell give me no-extra-charge Gold Client support, speaking to actual English speakers who are actually in the same city as me.
But no, IBM made a 'donation', so I've got to be the good corporate citizen and buy from IBM.
So don't for a minute be suckered by this good citizen stuff IBM would have you believe. IBM don't even piss about with that long term strategy of building product knowledge into kids who will buy out of familiarity when they reach positions where they make reccomending and buying decisions, no. IBM set out to pwn their victims short term, first generation, right now. The load schools with tech equipment and reap the benefits 10 years later is a relatively honourable approach that Apple pioneered in the early eighties, but IBM are way too impatient for that.
Fuckers.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Where is SusE/Novell in all this?
Right here:
Novell Drives Linux into Academia with Training and Technology
Here is the first paragraph:
WALTHAM, Mass.--19 May 2005--Novell today launched a new introductory Linux training course designed for academic environments, giving educational institutions a powerful new tool to promote open source training and students a new option for learning Linux. Unique among Linux vendor offerings, Novell's new course maps directly to one of the most widely recognized vendor-neutral certifications in the Linux market, CompTIA®Linux+, newly updated for 2005.Novell also announced it will donate $1.5 million in SUSE LINUX software and training materials to educational institutions to help promote Linux adoption.