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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.

2 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.