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UK Schools At Risk of Microsoft Lock-In

Posted by kdawson on from the apple-for-the-teacher dept.

Robert writes "UK schools and colleges that have signed up to Microsoft Corp's academic licensing programs face the significant potential of being locked in to the company's software, according to an interim review by Becta, the UK government agency responsible for technology in education. The report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft's licensing agreements provide value for money." In a separate report, Becta offered the opinion that schools should avoid Vista for at least another year, since neither Vista nor Office 2007 offers any compelling reasons for schools to upgrade.

4 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Another Problem by Red_Foreman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In a separate report, Becta offered the opinion that schools should avoid Vista for at least another year, since neither Vista nor Office 2007 offers any compelling reasons for schools to upgrade.


    Another problem is that the "dynamic network tuning" will not work with all routers and switches, causing a massive increase in cost to replace the network hardware.

  2. More a problem with the UK than US? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've spoken to people from the UK, and it seems that their universities are actually much more Windows-centric than US schools. Could this be because they networked later - the US has a strong Unix base dating from the days of ARPANet when Unix was the only game in town and Windows hadn't been invented yet? (And networking the first versions of Windows was a screaming bitch.)

    -b.

  3. Forcing MS in schools should be illegal. by Ant+P. · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In my last years of my old school they'd just finished throwing out around 300 perfectly functional 512K Macs and 2 rooms of Acorn computers, for a few hundred Pentium 2s running Win2k.
    On a good day the Windows machines "only" took 10 minutes to thrash their way to a login screen, 5 to get past the login screen and another 5 to go quiet. Until you tried to move the mouse. And the right mouse button was permanently disabled in explorer.exe, apparently for "security".
    When I'd left they were already halfway through replacing all the hardware because of constant complaints that apps like MS Office took 10 minutes (not kidding) to open. And close. Most people didn't bother logging out because of that, and you can imagine the fun that resulted.

    Then I got dumped with more of the same in college... *sigh*

  4. Re:I can confirm this by aedan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I work in Scottish schools. The whole authority went over to Windows as part of the PPP deal about 5 years ago. All the hardware is HP. The system is managed. If you want to have something added to it like a scanner, printer or software it will cost an arm and leg and you can only choose from their catalogue of hardware.

    Some of us bring in our own machines with other OS on them but most staff are not interested.

    I teach biology, not computing, but I use Apple and Linux machines to do it.