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Microsoft, Massachusetts, and IT
Andy Updegrove writes "A big story in Massachusetts last week was the announcement by Microsoft that it would give $30 million in software to Bay State high schools and universities. Less noticed was the fact that an important economic stimulus bill adopted by the legislature lacked the amendment that sought to gut the power of the State CIO to set any new IT policies that might require compliance with certain standards (like ODF) or favor open source software. Should these two dots be connected, and if so, how? After all, why would Microsoft reward Massachusetts for taking no action to curtail an IT policy that favored ODF and rejected Microsoft's own XML format, especially after Microsoft has by all accounts lobbied so aggressively to bring about a change? As it happens, the fact is that the game isn't over yet: I've learned that the IT policy language hasn't been permanently defeated — its just been shifted out of sight to an 'outside section' of the current budget bill."
For those software companies that don't have an academic injection strategy, I suggest you develop one.
Depending on the complexity/use of your software, you put it either in the primary schools (K-12) or secondary schools (colleges). And you make it free and secure. Use license pools/server or anything to get your product into the learning process. That's where the money is. That's where you ensure your future.
Back in my undergrad days, I had access to Matlab, Pro Engineer, Mathematica, MSDN licenses, Windows XP, Rational Rose, the list goes on. I think it was Macintosh that originally discovered that putting your technology into the hands of your youth ensures your future. Why? Because Americans are predominantly lazy and we hate to climb learning curves. Macs especially build a sort of security sense that the user is safe and the machine is super friendly.
You might call this the "bottom up" approach to seeding the public with your product. Because the students aren't customers but one day they will be raised to be customers and they will decide what will be used. If you don't believe this model works, you're a fool. Time and time again I've caught myself saying, I wish I could just script this in Matlab and let it dump it to an Excel sheet. It's not that it would be easier, it's just that I know precisely how to do computations in Matlab due to my undergrad years of using it.
Now you have Microsoft trying to stop a "top down" effect in Massachusetts. Whereby they try their "MSDN Academic Alliance" strategy targeting a state's public schools. But why are they only targeting Massachusetts? Probably because of the ODF movement in the state government. If the government mandates that everyone (schools included) use ODF files and ODF software, where does that leave Microsoft? No longer the primary tool of the children, that's where.
What's the lesson to learn from this article? The squeaky wheel gets the oil!
Not enough funding for computers and software at your school? Well then, simply alert your local media and just try to enforce the ODF standard. I think you'll find that Microsoft will suddenly come (with the national media) to meet all your software needs!
My work here is dung.
Regardless of the reasons why Microsoft donated the software the end result is that the kids are the winners. Their schools are now going to have some money that would have been spent on software that can now be spent on other things to improve their education. Motives aside, is that such a bad thing?
From the quoted article:"To be fair, the commitment of Bill Gates (at least) to education is sincere"
Apparently, that is, up until now. Maybe this is the one of the reasons he's leaving as CIO (well that and to get out of the way of Vista, since there's no Dave Culter to tell him to stop pestering the project this time). Maybe he just doesn't want to be seen as a corporate dirtbag any longer, or at least, further legitimatize real philanthropic pursuits. Then, maybe not.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Sometimes donations and campaign contributions are more akin to extortion payments than bribes.
Like Microsoft's monopoly or not (I don't), they ran into problems in the late 90s because they didn't give out much campaign contributions. They learned their lesson well.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
They want the schools to use Microsoft everything. They failed to change policy that would give people choice, so now they're just giving people Microsoft software.
Having a software monopoly helps to hold the monopoly together. They're smart, so they seek to maintain their monopoly even when it causes them to lose money.
In short, this is just a good investment for Microsoft.
Microsoft offered $30 Million in *SOFTWARE* license. That's not money. That's advertising. It's the same principle as drug dealers on the corner of the street offering free shots. Once the kids are hooked, they have nowhere else to go.
The schools can keep their $30 Million in the pocket when they use Open Source software just as well. The difference being that in a year from now they can get the next version for free too...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Is there some sort of filtering process during slashdot's account creation process that requires you make stupid, overzealous statements about the evils of government and politics? If you honestly believe the US is a bastion of corruption, you should try visiting a few other continents. My family is from Iran, and I've been back plenty of times, and I have to bribe the goddamned luggage handlers so I can get out of the airport in a timely fashion. And that's the tip of the freaking iceberg. I've been to Japan, Turkey, Hungary, Romania (where policemen are beaten for reporting police brutality), Bulgaria, the UK, France, and let me assure you, bribery and corruption are everywhere. I'm by no means a nationalist, but I know a good thing when I see it, and you have no idea how much better the US is when it comes to the rule of law.
P.S. Don't even get me started on Mexico.
It's almost the same as when the NFL sold out to EA. M$ is just using this as good P/R and the kids will like it because, hey, it's free stuff. Then again, some of these kids don't even know the potentially disasterous effects of using a M$ OS and neither do their teachers. Who wants to bet in a year, 50% of the software donated is infested with your everyday mal/spy/adware courtesy of their M$ OS.
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Microsoft has a long history of donating to charity and then taking a large tax deduction for the full retail price of the product. Since the physical manufacturing costs are so low for software after the initial investment of developing it, free software for education is both a PR win for Microsoft as well as well as a great tax shelter. But more importantly the schools that accept their software will now be future customers. And, the kids that use them will grow up to be consumers. They have been doing this for some time. They even give themselves the full retail sales price deduction for the software which is not customary among corporate donators (or at least it was not in the past).
And don't forget about the anti-trust settlement which allowed them to print money in the form of free software on CDs. Now, that's a sweet deal any company would jump at. Apple's opposed the deal since it hurt them.
Yet even in the US I recently read on a republican blogger's page someone comparing emacs (she called it emac) with M$ Word and dubbing emacs of being a word processor of lesser quality.
Let's be fair here; being uninformed about what emacs is, and writing a poor comparison in her blog has NOTHING to do with being a Republican.
If Mass. can deploy OO.o or other office tools for free, then the value of M$'s office tools to those same institutions is...essentially nothing. So what we are finding is that M$ is giving away software that is being given away by others anyhow. Granted OO.o isn't the same thing, doesn't have the same shine or finish to it, and is probably several years behind M$ in terms of features, but I am willing to bet that the vast majority of schools and schoolkids won't notice the difference.
Heck, I use office products all day every day, on one machine that has M$ office, and one that has OO.o and I can't say that I have noticed a significant difference in terms of my productivity, either.
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Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
So the gist of your argument is that corruption here in the US is ok because it's not as bad as some other places? That's got to be the weakest argument I've ever heard. Corruption should be fought whenever it is found. Yes, maybe things are better here, but they could be better still if we'd fight this kind of thing whenever it rears its ugly head. That's how we keep things better here.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Why should the state legislate favoritism toward open source software? Aren't they supposed to be unbiased and viewing IT policies from a strictly pragmatic point of view?
perhaps 'education' is best served by teaching students the principles of spreadsheets, wordprocessors, and presentations, rather than 'click button X to accomplish task Y'?
If that were the case, then perhaps educated students would be able to rapidly adapt to new interfaces rather than being stuck when a different product (or a new version of the product they were schooled on) is put in front of them?
IMO, kids that memorize button positions rather than learning principles are always going to be less productive, as even the same exact product will go through version changes, menus are replaced with ribbons, the UI flavor of the day (say docking windows or floating animated helpers) is tried out, etc.
IME, the real world in IT is one of constant change, and the folks best positioned to thrive there are the ones who are able to easily cope with multiple interfaces to the same basic task or principle.
This isn't a reward: this is good marketing. It's marketing because it costs Microsoft next to nothing to give software away (they've already paid to create it, and MA wouldn't buy it from them -- hence, very little lost $$). However, by giving it to students, they can train future generations on their software, thus helping to lock them into Windows & Office. When these students go out into the Real World, their only software experiences will be on MS stuff -- and thus, their employers will have incentives to use MS stuff rather than retrain them for something else. It's good marketing because, as stated above, it doesn't cost MS much $$. And smart companies always jump at the chance for cheap marketing.
/dev/random
I was born and raised in the US. My family is from Iran; I am not, at least not technically.
I really can't take you seriously after this point. If you honestly believe this, you have not travelled enough. Our government provides the most avenues for recourse for the general citizen than any other form of government today. We have plenty of problems, (my particular beef is with the overbearing power of the oil lobby, and our completely asinine foreign policy when it comes to Israel), but we are light-years ahead of any other form of government, and really any other system in the world that I've seen. Most of the corruption in the American system is not institutional. Contrast this with the Iranian government, where until Ahmadinejad came into power, very little on the institutional level got done without bribery.
Finally, the phenomenon you're describing is competition, not bribery. Microsoft is trying to convince a state legislature that their solution is the better one, and I can't think of a better way to do that than to provide the most commonly-used Office suite for free to state schools. Until you can show me that Bill Gates made a very large "contribution" to a politician's bank account, I'm not going to consider this corruption. Part of the responsibility of being a politician is balancing political image with personal responsibility. If our politicians were as incapable of doing this as you posit, we would be in far worse shape than we are now.
Maybe you are really bad at teaching your students then. The "basics" of word processing, using a spreadsheet, or creating a presentation typically apply across most office suites. Rather than teaching students to memorize exactly how Microsoft wants you to do things why not teach them to think logically and learn how to "learn" and adapt.
When I was growing up and going through grade school MS Office didn't have the monopoly it does now. I learned on Word Perfect, a bit on Lotus products, and some other package on an old Apple. Today, unfortunately, I have the great pleasure of having to work with MS Office all the time. I am still able to do my job, and quit well. So did not learning MS Office specifically in high school disadvantage me? Absolutely not!
Teach your students...don't brainwash them
The schools would have a lot more than $30 million if they didn't spend any money at all on commercial software, using free software instead. Free software in schools is interesting in that it's one thing that's both better and cheaper at the same time.
What constitutes a better education? Should children learn to push buttons, or should they learn the fundamentals? Using MS-Office in schools because that's what most of them will use professionally later is like having them read the National Enquirer instead of Moby Dick.
Microsoft wins when it stick a new generation of kids with its software. The kids will then be on the "Microsoft track", much more likely to use their Microsoft skills to ensure more Microsoft software is bought for them, and the people they communicate with, for the rest of their lives.
With so many colleges, Massachusetts is very influential in forming "software habits", apart from its rank as the 4th most populous state.
If Microsoft can use those "free bags" of smack to lure the state into making Microsoft's brand of junk into law, that's a big bonus. But just getting the kids hooked is worth doing, even if they have to wait for the state to require addiction.
--
make install -not war
I really can't take you seriously after this point. If you honestly believe this, you have not travelled enough. Our government provides the most avenues for recourse for the general citizen than any other form of government today. We have plenty of problems, (my particular beef is with the overbearing power of the oil lobby, and our completely asinine foreign policy when it comes to Israel), but we are light-years ahead of any other form of government, and really any other system in the world that I've seen. Most of the corruption in the American system is not institutional. Contrast this with the Iranian government, where until Ahmadinejad came into power, very little on the institutional level got done without bribery.
Then you missed the point of my expostulation. I personally don't believe this, but plenty of Americans do: on the one hand we're the greatest country in the world and on the other, the worst. I've travelled in Europe; I know how good I have it, but the majority of Americans have no inkling. They assume they are pawns in some kind of game and that's why voter turnout is so low here, because most people are convinced they have no say and that their vote doesn't change anything, whereas the opposite is true: by not voting, they perpetuate the system. It's a simple concept but too difficult for the average American to comprehend.
And what Microsoft is doing is bribery, though more subtle despite it's publicity. They are promising Massachusettes something for "free"; in return, they "expect" the government there to quietly kill off attempts to bring OSS/ODF to the state system. It's graft on an enourmous and completely legal scale, as Microsoft is not trying to line anyone's pockets overtly. But graft is graft. Admittedly, it's not the same as having to bribe baggage handlers to get your bags after a long flight, but no matter the scale, it's flat out wrong.
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No, kids will always still buy whatever their parents get for them, which usually happens through marketing, or whatever they have at work, etc. The schools haven't had any real power over this, ever.
So 50k machines out and say $300 per seat (IMO way too low but ...) equals $15M USD in hardware upgrade costs.
Before people freak clearly some machines would need replacing anyways but how many could be still used if they running something like ubuntu, xubuntu (lighter system requirements than the stock ubuntu) or even pupply gnu/linux? Why not phase in the upgrades and squeak an extra year or two out of the older hardware?
This is not a dig against MS but at the MA elected folks that agreed to this IMO costly "gift".
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST