Slashdot Mirror
School Software Licenses Under Review
Tony writes "ZDNet asks the question: 'Does Microsoft Campus give good value for money?' Its good to see a review of the dominant software, but the review is likely to lead to no or little changes, so the real question would be 'Is the review worth the money being spent on it?'."
...I can answer that question.
No.
Most of the Local Educational Authorities are in bed with Microsoft. Schools are free to do their own thing if they require, but doing so means you lose out on perks from the LEA such as other free software and support.
It is much easier for them if all the schools are running the same kit and software because it means they can all support things much easier (think IT helpdesks who are knowledgable in JUST the disciplines they need) and it helps them secure bulk deals. And even then, the savings aren't that great.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
Alright, I've been a Slashdot reader for many years now, and I've yet to ever complain about a story, even the blatant Slashvertisements. Usually I just ignore them. However, this story is probably the most useless thing I've seen posted here. I mean, honestly, the article has about 0 actual substance to it, all it says is that a review will be conducted. What is there to even discuss, as no facts are presented yet? Alright.. back to my hole...
Trying to deprive the children! They needClippy to show 'em what's good and right and true in this heathanistic world. I spit on you and your goat.
Can you imagine a graphic design school that didn't own a Mac? As much as it displeases me, schools aren't really in the same position as businesses & individuals when it comes time to evaluate software choices. The reality is that Windows is 'industry standard', as is Office, for the bulk of jobs that students will end up wotrking at. Most students with their own computers also run Windows/Office, and need some interoperability. It's not really as simple as measuring costs, support, productivity. Which sucks.
open source? Ha! It's used by .1% of non-geek office workers....
I don't know, but the university I went to was excellent when it came to pure computer science; it was a UltraSPARC/Solaris only when I started there in the 90's. Those of us who actually passed all the courses where Amiga or BSD users, who loved the Solaris environment and its technical benefits.
But the fact is, when I entered the consulting biz I had very little use for CS. Everything is done half-assed, if at all, and real science was nowhere to be found.
Now, I just switched job and have gone the Microsoft route, and stangely, the quality of work is much better. Simply because you can still to things "quick and dirty" and manage to produce some quite acceptable results.
Thus, if your goal is science (a PhD or similar) a Solaris/UNIX shop is the way to go, especially today with OpenSolaris. But if you're going to work in tha' biz, Microsoft is where it's at.
I still miss the good old days, but clients wont pay for quality unless its billions in cash at stake or a great possibility that people can die if something goes wrong (which is essentially the same thing to an enterprise).
I still run BSD at home, but I'm glad I can work with MS software as it stands.
Certainly my heartfelt gratitude go out to the Slashdot crew - especially ScuttleMonkey, bless his heart - for linking to such an enthralling tome of uncompromising educational policy.
One thing that annoys me about this subject is the deliberately misleading Microsoft advertisements aimed at parents. The ones that imply, for instance, that Microsoft software helps children become creative musicians, when Microsoft doesn't have any music creation applications.
I find it really outrageous that (in the UK at least) a big chunk of many schools IT budget goes towards Windows and Office, which are completely rubbish peices of software for educating young children. But the administrators don't understand much about computers, and the nice man from Microsoft is always taking them out to lunch, being helpful and giving them "special deals" which just happen to take up most of the IT budget...
so the real question would be 'Is the review worth the money being spent on it?'.
Usually when I wonder this, it's referring to PC Magazine.
The RTFA:
The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) said on 3 July, 2006 that it has teamed up with management consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) to find out whether colleges and schools are getting the best "value" out of using the dominant educational licensing product, Microsoft Campus.
A spokesperson for Becta said: "Becta has always recognised the importance of ensuring schools and colleges have access to a range of products and services that represent good value for money.
"In areas where a single supplier is dominant, particular vigilance is necessary to guarantee that this happens and that institutions do not find themselves inadvertently locked in to a particular supplier via, for example, a licensing mechanism."
Participating colleges will be asked to complete an online survey, along with a four-hour interview on campus.
The deadline for interested parties is the middle of July and the results of the review will be released in September 2006.
-Woof woof woof!
Becta are favourable to Open Source and open standards too. See their Technical Specifications document which, for example, requires text documents to be held as .txt, .rtf or .odt but NOT .doc.
See also Open Source Software in Schools: A case study report, Open Source Software in Schools: A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs, Open Source Software in Schools: Information sheet.
Andrew Yeomans
.... a review is being conducted, Tony wants to FUD the review process to claim its wasted money to EVEN DARE TO REVIEW WHETHER MICROSOFT IS GOOD VALUE FOR MONEY, so he posts it for discussion.
Thats why it's here, because Microsoft has turned from a software company to a political party, where products and features and ease of use no longer matter, it's marketing and dirty campaigning, and mud slinging that matter.
"Schools want to review the high cost of Microsoft products to save money".
Microsoft turfer flips it over, "Schools are wasting money on a needless review".
Swift boat veterans for less school waste.
Two advertisments:
MS Tech admin required: Salary £15k
Linux admin required: Salary £15
Which one will get more applicants do you think?
Support/maintanence costs for open solutions are higher than those for MS software.
In a lot of circumstances, the open solutions are better value for money even if they are more expensive. I can't however see any benefits for schools.
The kids will benefit from open software, but the schools, it'll be an expensive change and an administrative/bureaucratic nightmare.
(or LA, as LEAs have been rebranded)
It's true that maintained (ie non-private) schools do have huge autonomy in how they spend their budget and manage their IT, as long as they support the National Curriculum effectively.
However, most Primary schools are not large enough to employ anyone with any decent knowledge of IT, and overwhelmingly they surrender part of their budget to the Schools IT Service run by their Local Authority in order to sort these things out. More importantly, they don't have the time or expertise to even look into these things! Even Secondary (High) schools depend on the local IT Support service to some degree - for hardware and network support, if nothing else.
So, it's down to the LA - the Local Authority, your friendly county/district/borough/city council or Unitary Authority - to drive innovation and intelligent software choice in schools. And what do they do?
Well, yes, they're predominantly in bed with big corporations who have established enterprise sales, support and service structures in place to get the big council contracts. Now, generally the Schools IT Support teams are somewhat independent from the Corporate IT bods, but seldom are they entirely separate and there is usually a noticeable cross-over. My personal dilemma is that, while I support schools, I myself am supported by the Corporate IT team, and depend on them for my office workstation. The result? Thanks to Council IT Policy, I am forced to use MS for OS, Office and every other flavour of software and as a result, am only able to significantly support schools in the same software .
Oh, believe me, I would dearly love to get them using OpenOffice.org (which, irritatingly, Capita Education Services - the biggest UK supplier of Schools Management Information Software - do not support), Linux, Firefox, whatever, but because I'm part of this big horrible organisation, my hands are tied and so are the schools'.
The latest initiative from the government is to open up competition between various Council IT services so schools can go over the border and get their IT support & training from Bogcaster Council instead of Tadminster, but in effect this has virtually no impact since - as I mentioned before - most schools don't have the time or inclination to go hunting around. If it's not dropped in their laps, most schools won't actively seek change as it makes life busier and harder in the short-term.
In short: No, this report will not make any difference at all.
Meta will eat itself
The agreement is priced per employee, and covers all the computers owned. The fee has to be paid every year. You can exempt employees that don't use computers such as custodial staff. The fee for us is about $50/employee/year to get Windows, office, and all the client access licenses. For this price you get to run whatever the latest version of Windows/Office is available. When you quit paying the fee, you need to remove the software. For us the computer to employee ratio makes this much cheaper than buying the standard licences, even at educational prices. With standard licenses we have to pay to upgrade or deal with multiple versions of software across different labs and offices. Our license is funded by student fees and students have a great deal of input on how to spend it. We have several Linux and Solaris labs, but they sit mostly unused while there are lines at the Windows labs. The students prefer Windows, faculty and staff for the most part prefer Windows and Office and steer students there, and the businesses these students are hoping to work at in a few years are going to expect them to be familiar with current versions of Windows/Office and nothing a few computer geeks in the computing support area is going to change that. Not quickly anyway.
It would be interesting to weigh the benefits of teaching students to use computers including multiple platforms versus teaching them just to use certain applications (Office) on a single platform. From my experience in education (far too many years in university as a student and staff) I have found that often the students who have a varied experience are also the most comfortable learning new things. Computing is all about new things and if students are scared to try anything it is hard to get them to function, especially in a scientific environment.
I personally think that the whole standardisation on Windows is not about education quality but rather about making life easy for the teachers who often appear to only be a few pages ahead of the students when it comes to using software. Teachers are the limiting factor. Students are likely to adapt easily to all sorts of platforms without much trouble, but teachers (apart from a small number of bright individuals) have really only learned which button to mash so it isn't surprising that the pupils all learn what button to mash and when mashing that button doesn't work they don't know what to do.
Is this the future of computing? I really hope not. So no, standardising on a single software platform is not good as they do not learn how to adapt. Learning is not just about known how to do something, it is about why you did it.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
First, that's not the headline. The headline is "School Software Licenses Under Review."
Second, just as in the 1920s (or even today, in newsprint) there are formatting concerns with your copy. That hook line (which is what you are referring to) ideally should be in one line and be in a slightly larger font than the article text. In addition, it needs to fit in the width of the rest of the article, for ease of reading, and to allow ads next to the article.
Third, brevity is important to online journalism no less than print journalism -- people are scanning thousands or even tens of thousands of lines of text a day. Being succinct is crucial to be easy to read, which is something more online news sites should focus on.
Have a cup of coffee. Relax a bit. You're obviously a bit too high-strung at the moment -- very quick to call them 'idiots' when you apparently don't know the first thing about the "journalistic standards" you mention.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The situation is that there are to many evaluations of free software in education, but no one that really looks at the value of proprietary software. In Norway the number of computers has been doubled in education from the year 2000. With 250 Skolelinux installations as an exception, the most of the computers at 3900 schools has Microsoft Windows installed. Research done at the schools shows that the use of computers has stagnated, and in some courses it has decreased. Just in Norway it's done at least 3 evaluations of free software in Schools. Nobody has investigated if Microsoft software really works.
There are a heavy criticism of the use of computers at schools making the pupils to consumers with text-based tools with application e.g MS Office and some browsing of the Internet. The pupils use of computers at home is much more producer oriented with communication, gaming and making different things with picture and media clips. At home the pupils work with others on the Internet and exchanges what they have made. At schools the just work individually, not using their computer skills. MS Office is an individual application. That kind of office application has no communication value and it's heavily overrated as a teaching tool for learning. The scientists recommend a big change at schools, making more use of the pupils experience from home. If not utilise the pupils practice and experiences, they use of computers in schools could stagnate and the national plans using computers could be irrelevant in a future perspective.
The only thing Microsoft delivers is office applications and three communications application with e-mail, browser and a messenger (MSN). Teachers and the administration at schools takes it for granted that this i enough. But the don't at all give all the possibilities that the kids or a student use when they are using computers. In my opinion, if the science is done right, they will show that the immense selling effort done by the bureaucracy employed persons in the schools and higher education using office applications from Microsoft, is really hindering and crippling the learning process. When evaluating Microsoft product, the scientists will probably see that Microsoft immense and narrow focus on 5-6 applications has little or nothing to do with education.
So to investigate the use of Microsoft products could show that the products from Microsoft almost is irrelevant for teaching. The schools could easily replace Microsoft with free software where the educational applications could be used in a standard browser (e.g Firefox) and many of the educational programs that are available as free software.
A study that says "The status quo is perfectly fine, carry on as you are" is fine, as long as it was conducted properly and drew valid conclusions.
That is, even if it changes nothing, it doesn't mean it wasn't worth the money. Anyone who doesn't review policies and processes regularly has no idea whether they're even relevant any more. "Carry on as you are" can be just as valid an answer as "change it like this".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The college that I attend said that they didn't find a reason to renew their subscription with Microsoft - supposedly not enough people took advantage of it. I feel that they didn't mention it to students enough (because how I found out about it at all was another student mentioning it to me).
They went along to mention to us that the Microsoft products would still be available for "discount prices," although they failed to mention any such prices.
It was nice, for a while at least, for us college students to obtain Windows for $5.
At the university that I attend (which is a really big one), I've noticed the EULA for the M$ software is somewhat strange. (We have the deep discount program where software can be "purchased" much more cheaply than the "academic" versions, with some restrictions.)
For something like ~$50, students can "license" Microsoft Windows/Office under the EULA until one of the following occur:
1) They quit the university (they can't use the software anymore)
2) They graduate (Then they get to keep it)
3) The school-specific contract/EULA expires!
My school representatives and the Microsoft contacts I have emailed (which happened to be located in India), assure me that #3 isn't a problem. It should also be noticed that the Microsoft representatives I contacted refused to give me an electronic copy of the regular Academic software EULAs, citing it was not available online [I later found it on microsoft.com]. However the actual terms of the 'contract' spell out that the terms are with respect to a particular *version* of the contract.
Thus, even if the school renews the contract (which I can only assume would get a new version), the licenses granted under the old (expired) contract would appear to be invalid. They may/may not be the intent, but it clearly is implied by the letter of the document.
Which means more $$$ for Microsoft! Darn!
And for me, since #3 will occur before #2 [and I'm almost done], it means anyone who pays money to Microsoft right now will be technically screwing themselves.
You're recommending coffee to an already high-strung person?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Human beings have two modes of learning.
Babies and young children learn by rote {means-oriented}. Older children learn more in terms of abstract concepts {end-oriented}. This is an evolutionary necessity; a three-year-old probably hasn't worked out the likely consequences of tumbling over a cliff edge, so a harsh reprimand from an adult can literally be a lifesaver. Teenagers think they know it all and are continually experimenting with boundaries. Adults have a tendency to revert spontaneously to means-oriented learning if they think they cannot understand something.
Now, as things currently stand, Microsoft have achieved a monopoly through a combination of illegal and immoral practices. So schools are teaching Microsoft because "it's what they'll encounter in the real world", and meanwhile businesses are buying Microsoft because "it's what they learned in school".
Schools today are basically free Microsoft training centres. The kids don't learn word processing, they learn MS Word. They don't learn spreadsheets, they learn Excel. They don't learn to design web pages, they learn FrontPage. The teachers are just parrotting from the Microsoft textbook. All those unreliable Windows machines need resetting from time to time, so a full-time "IT technician" is required to go around rebooting them and never understanding what went wrong in the first place. This demeans the job title of technician {it used to mean "someone who knows just as much as an engineer, works just as hard as an engineer and gets paid half as much as an engineer"}. A monkey could be trained to do that, for crying out loud. Maybe somewhere in the world there is an organisation which has actually trained a monkey to reboot misbehaving Windows boxes. Actually, Microsoft are working on lowering the status of "engineer" as well {it used to mean "someone who did more mathematics at university than someone on a mathematics course"}.
Maybe if schools weren't indoctrinating impressionable minds into The Microsoft Way from an early age, then businesses wouldn't all be buying MS Office "because it's what they learned in school".
I was actually around in the 1980s, and I was forced to listen to all the music that doesn't get played at "80s nights" because it was shite. In order to survive around computers in those days, you had to pick up on abstract concepts because there was no consistency. BBCs, Commodore 64s, Orics, Spectrums, Dragon 32s, Amstrad CPCs, and the obsolete models they had replaced -- they were all different. Get yourself an emulator and some tape images, and have a play. Newsagents sold magazines with listings that the truly masochistic could spend hours typing in. Some people actually managed to hack a program written in one computer's dialect of BASIC to run on another {I accomplished this feat at least twice myself, modifying a PILOT interpreter originally meant for the Apple ][, and a text adventure game meant for the Oric, to run on the BBC model B}. As the next-generation machines like the Amiga took over, type-in listings disappeared; due in no small measure to the lack of a useful bundled programming language. {AmigaBASIC was like a poor-quality "1970s crate" emulator; barely computationally-complete, and certainly couldn't be used for writing any sort of application programs.} When I left school and went to university, there was a curious mix of DOS, VAX/VMS; and, later, more or less heavily modified versions of Unix. The VT220-alikes in a room wouldn't even necessarily have the same keyboard layout.
I survived.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
So who cares what the non-Geek users are using? Thats like trying to understand where a herd of horses is going without looking at the lead stallion. Of course most of us are not as physically imposing as a stallion, but the analogy has some validity: If the lead stallion is considering the needs of the herd, he can succeed. If the open source Geeks are looking our for the needs of the non-Geek office worker, they too can succeed and that success is good for all. There are many forms of leadership, Geeks provide the technical leadership of society.
Think global, act loco
This is another example of the "Micro$oft $ucks" slashdot mentality.
/windows "music creation software"/ and what do you know: 70,000 results.
Worst-case scenario: A parent sees the commercial and decides that instead of the new Macbook that their son asked for to assist with his music production, they could purchase a great Wintel notebook for 2/3 the price. So they head to Best Buy, pick it up, and perhaps after they give it to their son they find out that it doesn't have ANY MUSIC CREATION SOFTWARE! Oh No! So they search Google for
Looks like those parents were DECIEVED all right.
Microsoft is advertising their platform. Their brand. Maybe the best thing is that in a year when the kid no longer cares about creating digital music he can use his Windows-based notebook to run any of the millions of other software applications that have been written for Windows over the past 15 years.
It's like saying that Gatorade commercials are deceptive because Gatorade doesn't actually sell sporting goods equipment.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
For products it is not legal to charge two customers different prices without some approved mechanism (like coupons). Mr. White comes in and buys a loaf of bread for $1, then Mr. Black comes in and it's suddenly $2. Illegal. Now if Mr. French comes into a store in Paris, you can charge him $3 for a loaf, while charging Mr. Indian in New Delhi $0.10. Legal. Hell, if you're Amazon.com you can charge totally different prices for Star Trek box sets and other DVDs depending on what region you're selling them to. Legal (grrrr).
But for services, it is different. You can charge your clients whatever you please. You can even forbid them (legal?) from disclosing the rates they're getting to anyone else. You can do pro bono work and charge nothing at all.
So what is software? A product or a service? I guess it depends. It can be a pretty grey area, bit I guess when licensing is involved it becomes a service, and so Microsoft and others can then charge whatever they please.
But the ethical issues just don't go away. Why is it OK to charge A US company, say, $10,000 for a 100 user site license, a US school $2,000 for the same, and a Kenyan school $100? Why not charge $100 to everyone? Is it fair to gouge US companies, just because they can afford it? Microsoft hasn't made hundreds of billions in profit over the years for no reason.
So I guess my question is, why do the laws and ethics of differential (and disrcriminatory) pricing only apply to traditional products and not to services (like law and medicine) or hybrids like software?
A-Bomb
So why isn't desktop software purchased the same way as every other item a school buys? Just put out a spec saying what it has to do and the level of support expected and take the lowest reputable bidder. If the spec says: "must have email, spreadsheet, word processor, email, etc." then OK, but if it is written to say "must be MS" then something is wrong. If they were doing that, there would be no need to have to "review" whether they did the right thing, they would have done that up front.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
In the 90's, Microsoft figured out how to out-Apple Apple in their marketing to colleges and universities. They used their market share to sell colleges that they're doing their students a dis-service if they don't run Office because that's what they'll be running once they graduate. The pricing for Campus is less than a Select or Enterprise agreement and it makes the act of being a software reseller for Microsoft a much easier enterprise for the campus bookstore if they don't go through a clearinghouse for that sort of thing.
Currently Apple markets mostly to primary-secondary education with the graphic arts programs being the big competition space for them in colleges. Most of the bargain is if you opt to finance through apple as an individual teacher or institution. If Apple had some bright sales reps, they'd be pumping dual-boot mac-minis across the desks of a number of IT departments in colleges and universities. With dual boot, they can sell flexibility at a marginal cost increase and set up the MAC OS for internet use and the Windows OS for corporate-life preperation.
STFU & GBTW
It really doesn't matter if you (or I) think a given application is crap. It's what the teacher or other user thinks that matters. These are mostly competent people with jobs to do. In my experience, there isn't one IT guy in ten that remotely understands what teachers and school staff do or what tools they actually need. It's their house. You should play by their rules if you can. There are a few exceptions -- for example HTML eMail -- where the security risks to the school network may need to override the user's preferences, but mostly it should be their call.
BTW, if you think that Windows educational software is crap (and in many cases I wouldn't argue with you), is it realistic to propose Web based stuff as an alternative? In my experience, most of it doesn't run anywhere near as well as the Windows based stuff you dislike. IMHO HTML with or without help from CSS,Java, Flash, et al is a long, long way from working even as well as Windows 3. It's OK for simple data presentation applications. Pretty much a disaster beyond that. But that's changing? Sure. In a decade, maybe two, it may well be ready for prime time.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
"In addition, in many countries a copy of Windows must purchased with the machine notwithstanding that is a clear violation of the most basic antitrust principles."
Is it? Or is it more likely that the alternatives aren't "effective" (for various reasons) and hence the OEM's don't offer them? It might be said to be a "antitrust violation" if the alternatives were a one to one replacement, but they're not, and you can't fault the OEMs for making an economic instead of an ideological decision.
My University has a two independent computer networks as far as I know: "Computer Science" and "Everyone else". The "Everyone Else" network runs XP Home, MS Office, IE, with Exchange Webmail for email access, MSN Messenger and the MS Language tools. The Computer Science network runs White Box Linux, with Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice and general Linux dev tools like Netbeans, GNU Emacs, Gedit etc.
Each network's suited to it's purpose. Obviously (for example) I'd prefer it if they made Firefox the default browser on the main network (an older version is available, buried in a 'Utilities' section of the start menu, most people don't know it's there) but then you lose IE-Only functionality in the webmail. I suspect the university gets massive discounts on it's bulk licensing by making MS pretty much ubiquitous.
I'd be curious to see how a more widespread Linux roll-out would work on campus. Obviously the more tech-savvy CS users have no problem with it, and obviously different tools would need to be made available to the other students (I can't see the art department having pupils write their dissertations in LaTex for example) with Windows being made available for the software that requires it.
I would love it if someone would build me a new porch. New porches in my area are all the rage. Concrete with a cover and some hanging baskets, possibly screened-in or glassed in so you can injoy the outdoors, without the heat and bugs.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
If all you get for the licence fee is a promise that the Microsoft lawyers won't sue you, then no, they are not good value. You would be better off with pencil and paper.
So one frat on campus gets a place to put a rotten couch and louunge in front of the frat house drinking beer because the college bought into a massive Microsoft software license? Wouldn't a free Porsche be more of an enticement/bribe? And what exactly can a school do with an expensive car that seats 2 (maybe 4). I'm thinking that one of the on-campus frats should fill a balloon with shaving cream and hang it from a light post above the car ("Scent of a Woman"-style). For future reference, "Porsche" has an "s" in the middle and is always capitalized (as it is a brand... which is a proper noun).
"If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates." - Jay Leno
The local high school requires that every student complete a 'tech' requirement to graduate by either passing an online test or by taking a one-semester 'tech' class. The 'tech' subjects that the students are required to know are not computer languages, file systems, operating system functions, user interface layout, programming, etc. No, the 'tech subjects' are MS Excel, MS Word, MS Publisher, MS Powerpoint, and MS Front Page. The online test displays screens from these apps and then asks the student to select the proper menu choice to perform some desired action. The student gets three trys for each question and then they 'fail' the question and on to the next. Worse is that the test is based on Office XP, not Office 2003. Of course, Office 2007 will have different menus so all of that 'knowledge' will soon be obsolete. Keep in mind that a lot of these kids have parents who work at Microsoft.
If you do not understand the EULA, or you do not understand FERPA, do not buy software for a school. You are comitting a felony under FERPA. Ther are specific requirements for student privacy, which are violated by M$' license agreements, which state that they may tap into and watch any user's PC at any time, and that they may seek out any data stored on that computer.
Andy Out!
Airlines are the same; they need to offer 'first class' and 'economy' fares. A seat still available 30 seconds before the door closes is worth more than a seat that you promise to occupy 6 months ahead; higher risk to the airline, though, because if no-one buys the seat by the time the door closes, it's not worth anything.
Microsoft seen to have used 'differential pricing' to induce dependency; but I can still use pencil, paper, and crayons. I am not dependent on them. I can write software, too.
I used to work for a software firm that wrote software for the property and caualty insurance industry. The practice of charging price 'A' to one customer and price 'B' to another is not necessarily discriminitory. Its more of a way to get your product into the hands of users who can't necessarily afford it.
For example. The company I worked for based the price to charge a client (insurance company) on their direct written premium (DWP). A small company could have a low DWP and be charged less than a company that was larger, and whose DWP was higher than the small company. It could also be flipped around the small company could have a higher DWP than the larger one. This may be because the larger company bought a smaller one to get into the insurance market and the smaller company has a better sales force or is highly specialized. Regardless, the price was based on DWP.
So maybe one company gets charged $1000 and the other $10,000. This isn't discriminatory because its what the company could afford. Its a win-win situation. The company got some money for its software even at $1000 and we have a nice addition to our user base. The real win is that the customer is now a user of that software and not someone elses. With this particular type of software being so expensive its likely that the new customer will not change vendors in quite a few years. (A lot of deals were in the millions along with a few years of implementation)
Microsoft is attempting something similar here albeit on a smaller scale. Sure they may not get a real financial return on their software that they sold to the Kenyan school for $100 bux. But the REAL return is that the kids in the Kenyan school are learning on MICROSOFT products and will know how to use those products and not the products of a Microsoft competitor and once a person gets familiar with something, its much harder for them to change to something that does the exact samething, even if it is cheaper or just plain free.
Don't get me wrong I am not trying to defend Microsoft by any stretch, but I can see what they are doing and its nothing more than what a lot of companies currently do to get users/customers.
They are merely attempting to price products appropriately to the region in which they are selling.
i thought you were retiring?
seriously, though, the courage to end drug addiction isn't found in most folks. linux is not hard to administor - don't extrapolate the myriad of windows problems to a well thought out linux set up.
one problem is OPM - other people's money. it is so easy to spend it.
Until other software is predominant in the world outside of school, it will be prudent to use software in school that will be found in the future jobs of graduates. In general terms that means Microsoft products. Why train students to use only Linux or other open source software if over half the students will never see or use it in their jobs?
-Eric