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?'."

Comments

Re:Don't usually complain but...

[honkycat]

I've got to agree with you on this one. The net content of this article was that somebody is going to do a study. Ok, great. It'll be news when the study is done and tells us something interesting. This story isn't even interesting for the debate it will spark on slashdot itself -- it's just begging for a flamewar. Can we mod the story down flamebait? (or off-topic, as we'll surely be modded...)

Re:As an IT manager in a UK primary school...

[TubHarsh]

It is much easier for them if all the schools are running the same kit
I would agree that it is much easier to support if all schools are running the same, but if they have to neglect other software concerns such as security, they should consider switching.

In some colleges and universities in the US (which are also mostly in bed with Microsoft), IT managaers are switching pre installed web browsers on college ownewd computers to Firefox.

In a few instances like Pennsylvania State Univ. telling Students to chuck IE, the school can even influence which software the students use.

If the IT owners at these schools see a tangible benefit to switching from a Microsoft Product to a non-Microsoft Product they will do so.

CS

[FullMetalAlchemist]

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.

Re:Deceptive advertising

[lukas84]

See, the problem is much more complicated than that.

(Disclaimer: This is the situation in switzerland)

Schools can't afford to hire qualified personal. A qualified System Administrator costs something from 6-10k per Month (x13). This is A LOT of money for a school.

Also, professional IT doesn't come cheap, and you usually have several software requirements. It's next to impossible for a "normal" School to get professionally supported (NBD Replacement for 3-5 years, Beige Boxes are NOT ACCEPTABLE) Machines without Windows licenses, so it would be a waste not to use them.

OTOH, microsoft offers significant discount for its software to schools. So it might be a lot cheaper to use a microsoft environment, because microsoft environments don't have compatibility problems which might necessitate the use of vmware, or sometimes even a windows terminal server.

Don't forget that a school usually consists of TWO different infrastructures. A smaller one for all the internal administration stuff, which most of the times REQUIRES windows, because of the ERP or Archival Software used, and a learning network. The latter COULD be setup using linux, but it would require additional infrastructure, which would in turn cost more money.

This is also the reason why most schools don't have a professional it at all. Setting up a windows environment is usually less complicated, but still, qualified windows personal is still rare and expensive.

Re:As an IT manager in a UK primary school...

[Mad Merlin]

But by switching they neglect great deals like a free porche bundled with purchase of a million licenses. As long as OSS can't give out free porches as bonus to government-funded purchases, we're on a lost position.

So... take the money you didn't spend on a million software licenses, and buy a couple thousand Porches? I fail to see how buying proprietary software works out for the better here.

Maybe if I sell you a copy of RHEL 4 for $200,000 and throw in a free Porche, would that make it better?

Re:Deceptive advertising

[joe 155]

I have to agree with you; I'm at uni at the mo so I've been in education for about the last 15 years, and with the exception of a crazily old BBC computer or whatever it was I've never seen anything but windows. When your younger I guess you don't tend to notice it as much but I really wish they'd at least given us some ability to use other systems. At uni I recently started a flame war(unintentionally) through my blog because I dared to suggest that our uni might use OO and Linux and other free software. Tellingly I got one reply (from a woman) who said that females don't know how to use computers as well as men so its unreasonable to expect them to learn... which is bullshit, but it gives you some idea of what your up against.

These are views which I saw replicated over and over, "it's too hard to learn" "I don't want to learn" "OMG!!!1 MS is teh best!!111!!!". In order to make any change you have to first get to these people, a ground up change.

Re:Deceptive advertising

[Arivia]

My school board did that: http://slashdot.org/articles/04/06/08/0328257.shtm l?tid=102&tid=146&tid=185&tid=187&tid=99

They licensed it in 2004, and it made it into the 2005 updates to school IT infrastructure.

You know how many times I've seen it used?

Once.

You know why?

Because as a TA for a Writer's Craft class, the final assignment I created necessitated using the PDF export features that StarOffice had and MS Word did not.

I spent at least six hours that semester helping students fix formatting problems that had occured in the transition using nothing more complex than page breaks.

Mind share does not correlate to market share; in this case, despite the installed alternative, the students stuck to what they knew best, which is Microsoft Office.

Change afoot

[ajs318]

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.

and what that this prove?

[shis-ka-bob]

The PC and Internet revolutions were Geek-driven. The non-Geek office workers were quite happy with secretaries and file clerks. Remember when 'file' meant a pile of papers sitting in folder and 'file search' meant rummaging though cabinets trying to figure out if the file was misplaced or if you simply had the wrong key work (e.g. 'Car Insurance', 'Auto Insurance ' or 'Insurance for the Honda'). The non-Geek office worker was satified with this.

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.

Re:As an IT manager in a UK primary school...

[vtcodger]

Actually, I agree. ***BUT*** Elementary and Middle School students and staff don't need Excel. Virtually any spreadsheet that doesn't produce incorrect answers will satisfy 99.98% of their needs -- which are minimal because few people will actually use a spreadsheet to do even simple tasks ... even if they have been trained in how to use them. The School District CFO may need a copy of Excel as may the school clerks since there seems to be no way to keep people from trying to use Excel as a data collection tool. There may even be the odd teacher and student who can benefit from Excel. By all means give it to those who need it. But for the most part, any freeware spreadsheet will do everything that normal people need.

BTW, are you aware that clipboard in Excel works differently than other Windows programs? That's because Microsoft ported Excel and its programmers from the Macintosh, and these folks (who for some unknowable reason are very proud of their user interface) never bothered to bring the clipboard into compliance with the IBM CUA conventions that are used in other Windows software. I expect that the reason that this has never become an issue is not that the Excel user interface is brilliantly designed. It's because very few people actually use the thing.

In five years in a school, I only ever saw Excel actually used by the CFO; the school clerk (for some data collection efforts); in a short unit to teach grade 7-8 students what a spreadsheet is (It reduced students to tears, appallingly often); The staff in a (largely unsuccesful) attempt to automate supply purchasing (Excel really wasn't the right tool); and by the gym teacher who had kids enter their race times after they finished running. Only the first and last efforts really seemed viable. Oh yeah, and I used it occasionally to straighten out data bases and generate specialized reports because it may be a lousy data base manager, but it looks a lot better when your other alternative is Access.