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UK Schools At Risk of Microsoft Lock-In
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.
Thankfully, we just replaced all our switches (well, the 95% that aren't cheap SOHO switches) so we're ready for Vista.
We're considering making the switch to Vista in summer 2008. Two very good reasons:
1) We need a way to pressure the school board into buying about 500 new PCs to replace a large portion of our inventory that dates to the late 1990's. Vista and its requirements are currently the best way we have to do it, since all other attempts have failed.
2) We tested a number of our aging and poorly-written edutainment titles on RC2, and most of them didn't work. The network admin was delighted at the prospect of forcibly retiring these support nightmares, allowing him to take down two old servers and freeing up the whole IT staff for more important work than fixing video drivers every time Little Billy clicks the wrong button (why there is a button in this software that hoses the video drivers is beyond me, but it's there and doesn't seem to do anything else)
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
All the school systems in my area use Macs. Even though there's less flexability in software, they are safer. I would say as a rule not to make deals with MS, as Apple is not ruthless to my knowledge. It's good that they're not switching to all the new products, but they should open their horizons. Microsoft is money-hungry in general, so shame to the people who didn't know that. Do the math and Microsoft just sucks out money. DON'T MAKE ANOTHER DEAL! Macs come with helpful software, so that's a plus that they should've considered. Free>corrupt contracts with tricky math.