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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.
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These features aren't compelling?!
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.
ALL schools, or in fact anyone who signs an über-licensing agreement with MS are at risk for "lock in", especially if you define "lock in" as being "we spent all our money on products from company X, so we have none left to buy products from company Y".
How is this even news? What's next, if you spend a dollar today, you don't have a dollar tomorrow?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Remember what Apple did with giving away free macs to schools so that kids used that at an early age and were familiar with them instead and thus wanted them at home? I bet Microsoft will do the same for Vista in schools everywhere but this time, instead kids won't say "aww that's cool!" they'd probably say things more like "why the hell is this taking 10 minutes to boot" (we say that at my college already) and "oh look, the IT people let us be able to do this!" since nobody's extremely familiar with all the things you have to do to Vista to make them middle school kids with technicial skills proof lol. So yeah, there's compelling reasons for Microsoft to get schools to upgrade to Vista and lock em in with a license but there's definitely tons of reasons for schools to not upgrade. And of course it's a massive waste of money that could be better spent anywhere else in the school
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
-b.
I doubt that Windows will be as popular in 10 years as it is now. That's just the way of things - new technologies come around and old empires decline. Windows is an overcomplicated, bloated, resource-hogging OS any way you look at it. Also, Windows isn't the best OS to teach programming on because of its complexity.
-b.
Hooray!
Common sense arrives at last. It's only taken more than a decade! Now, could we possibly do something about the actual REAL problem, being the Research Machines monopoly over just about every government contract to do with schools and the majority of the school market in the UK despite their poor support, substandard hardware, astronomical pricing and hard-sales tactics and MS-only policies that thus reinforce the MS monopoly?
(If you didn't already guess, I work in schools within the UK).
It's an issue because instead of teaching a set of tools for general ICT use, you'd be teaching how to use specific instances of Microsoft software. In general, we attempt to teach a range of skills which are applicable to all systems - the general computing ideas that enable slashdot-types to sit down with Mac, Linux or Windows and have at least a general idea of how to do something. Often, the best teaching platform isn't Windows. Sadly, it's what we usually have.
ICT teaching is more than learning how to use Microsoft Office. It's about modelling, problem solving, that kind of stuff. Done correctly, using Office isn't a problem, and neither is using Open Office, Textease, Tizzy's First Tools or any of the other myriad software programs UK schools make use of on a daily basis.
That's exactly what I think. The time for the Windows era to come to an end is nigh.
The only remaining question is will Windows' successor be Mac OS X or Linux, or will we (finally) evolve to the point that the choice of platform no longer matters.
I'm betting on the latter, myself.
My blog
I vote for "none of the above - it hasn't been developed yet." All three popular systems are based on underlying structures that are getting to be very long in the tooth.
-b.
...And I fail to see how this hasn't already happened.
:p)
Props to Becta for doing such a study. They're a good thing and I like what they do for educational IT. However, we're already locked into Microsoft on the client side.
All applications that our kids use will only work on Windows. Office is the "standard" that they all get taught (yes, I've put OpenOffice on - without teachers wanting to use it, Office is the only thing used). The educational applications that they use every day will only run on Windows (and some maybe on OSX, but we're not rich enough to afford Macs, I'm afraid.)
The licensing agreements are alright - we're looking at about £28/workstation/year for ~450 machines, which is just over £12k/year for licensing. While that is a nasty chunk of money, it means we're entitled to the latest and greatest on release - as such, I've got Office 2007 and Vista on my work laptop giving them a whirl.
Wine! I hear you say Wine! Sorry, no go. We cannot risk apps not working because Wine doesn't support them fully. The teachers would eat my testicles for dinner - it's bad enough dealing with the poorly written educational software as it is, nevermind dealing with Wine on top of that.
There isn't enough scope in the Curriculum to let kids even learn about alternative operating systems. I use Linux at home exclusively for desktop use, yet at work we're using 450ish XP clients, 5 Windows-based servers and 1 Linux server (for internet caching/filtering). It annoys me that there isn't much I can do personally to let them know there are alternatives out there without running my own after school class or something, which I can't see many people wanting to attend (and I'm not the teaching type).
As for the upgrade thing - don't we know it. Office 2007 rollout isn't going to happen before September, if not 2008 (getting the teachers to put time in learning the new interface so they can teach the kids is the hard part!). Vista probably 2009 at the earliest - depending on what incompatibilites we'll come across during testing.
All in all, unless you get the application developers to start making things cross platform, we can't move to Linux/[other alternative], and until people start moving to Linux application developers won't develop applications for it! Chicken and egg problem.*
(* - I know this was solved!
In actual fact, you would end up with better windows users if they were exposed to *nix first. At least they'd be able to think for themselves.
As the parent of 3 children in the Scottish school system (which is substantially different from the system in England and Wales) I can confirm that M$ has a strangle hold on education in my country. A couple of years ago I sent a detailed letter expressing my concerns to the local director of education. After some time I received a considered response saying that M$ is the only game in town and that alternatives are irrelevant at best. Some of the phrasing in this letter I recognised from previous /. stories concerning M$ FUD, I suspect that the director of education contacted her IT dept. who in turn contacted their software vendor (M$) seeking reasons to justify the status quo.
Personally I blame the IT staff who tend to be very M$ centric and in the business for the perceived financial rewards rather than the love of IT itself. They will never recommend the use of something they don't understand as they will have to retrain and/or find themselves looking for another job. Windows as we know it is on the way out, in a decade or so it will no longer have a monopoly on the desktop or anywhere else.
It is my belief that teaching 'The Windows way' is harmful to my children's education, they would be much better served by learning software that conforms to true standards and that fosters a real understanding of the principles involved in IT rather than simple button clicking. I run Linux exclusively at home (I've been Windows free since ME), my daughters both understand IT well and rarely have to come to me for help with their web pages or anything else. They have both avoided studying IT subjects at school as they view the IT syllabus as 'A joke', their words, not mine.
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*
Dead on. I was just going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it.
:)). When she was at my place and needed to check something on the internet, she just sat down and did it. She didn't even think about the fact that this wasn't familiar until she had already fired up Firefox. She knew nothing about Linux prior to this, but when you sit down at the screen and you see "Applications" menu, and under that menu, there's an "Internet" menu, and in that menu, there's a web browser that you know and love from Windows (Firefox), there is nothing really to think about. The transition to OpenOffice was seemless as well. She uses it full time, yet I have never given her any kind of training in it. It's all there, it's just a matter of finding out where, and that only takes about 2 seconds of your time.
I'd like to add, though, that far too often, those who were given specific training in something like MS Office, are completely lost when they are introduced to anything else. For example, Lotus Notes vs. MS Outlook. On job postings for a lot of administrative type jobs, you see "Must be proficient in " An applicant who was tought specifically how to do Outlook, will not even apply to a job that asks for Lotus. The idea that they are both just basically the same thing doesn't really stick. The same goes for any other piece of software. Operating systems are a good example, because I have observed the use of all 3 by n00bs. It's mostly a fear factor than anything really. I use Linux, the girlfriend used Windows (not anymore
The bean counters only reinforce the fear factor. They reason that we must teach our kids on the same thing they will be using in the "real world." Unfortunately, you are only creating a robot, who is programmed to do one thing and cannot think and learn for itself.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Exactly.
The real difference here is between a vocational/technical school for office workers or secretaries and a real liberal arts education. There's nothing inherently wrong with courses on how to use Office (or any other particular software application), but that's not what most education is supposed to be about, especially not before there's separate tracks kids can choose between vo/tec and "regular".
The same problem can be seen in higher education, at least in the US, particularly in realms like Computer Science. Rather than teaching people how to be real scientists who're focused on computers, they're producing programmers. Programming is clearly an important skill for many of these people, but it's not the same thing. Universities teach intro programming courses now in Java or C++ because those are the marketable things; never mind the fact that they're abysmal teaching languages. Folks who recommend teaching intro courses in C or Smalltalk or whatever are laughed at because those languages aren't "practical".
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
95 might have been bad by today's standards, but it wasn't when it came out. It was a huge leap ahead from Windows 3.1 and DOS with things like a taskbar, integrated network stack, and other improvements to usability. The Mac might have been better at the time, but Apple knew this and charged an arm and a leg for them. I guess one could have used a UNIX variant or Windows NT, all of which were technically superior, but NT was in its teething stages in 1995 and so was Linux and the BSDs. Only the old-line UNIXes were really around in full force then.
Now Me...Me was a dog when it came out and everybody knew it. Fortunately for MS, it was introduced alongside what is arguable Microsoft's best OS to date, Windows 2000.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
I see you've never actually sat an ICT course in the UK then.
I sat one because my school didn't go computing. I was taught how to use Word, Excel, Access, VB and Publisher. Use of more flexible, powerful or simply different applications (For example trying to use a MySQL server to do the database work) was frowned upon.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Just because the design of Unix is "very long in the tooth" doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it; that's just argumentum ad novitatem.
The fundamental design of the automobile hasn't changed much in over a hundred years. It still has an internal combustion engine (albeit sometimes augmented with electric), four wheels with pneumatic tires, a steering control based on a wheel that operates the front two wheels, a geared transmission from the engine to the wheels, a cabin in the middle with engine space and cargo space on front and back (albeit sometimes reversed). Sure, we've seen improvements--seatbelts, increasing automation, crumple zones--but the fundamental design hasn't changed. I don't seriously expect it to either. We're not suddenly going to be zooming around in South Park style "IT" wheels.
Similarly, the fundamental design of the camera didn't change much for a long time. Lens at the front, rectangular body containing film on a spool which moves past the rear of the lens, rotary controls on the lens, shutter top right of the body, eyepiece or viewing screen on the back. Digital has been the biggest shakeup, but you'll notice digital SLRs are still the same basic shape as film SLRs, even though there's no reason at all why they need to be.
Analog wristwatches are another example. They haven't changed design in several hundred years. Same 12 hours arranged in a circle, long hand and short hand, adjustment control on the right edge of the case, strap attached at top and bottom of case. When they went digital, there was a brief change, but now we've mostly swung back to using hands that move in a circle again, just with a different mechanism inside. And again, a quick look at Tokyoflash's web site will prove that there's absolutely no reason why this basic design needs to be kept. But it is. And we still have mechanical watches made and sold that use the same hundred-plus year old mechanisms.
I'm not saying that Unix is perfect; I'm just saying that its organic community-led growth and continued robustness and adaptability make it seem likely to me that the basic design is sound, and not something that needs to be thrown away.
There are certainly interesting possibilities in alternative OS design. The Apple Newton was a good example. But most of the radical attempts to reinvent the OS have failed. It might be that the design we've arrived at with Unix is going to last for hundreds of years, much to some people's disgust.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Lock-in is the inevitable result of a monopoly. And I am not talking about Microsoft's monopoly either, although that is part of it.
When you have a vast, overwelming quasi-nationalized top-down educational beurocracy, with and almost total monopoly of education - the inevitable result is exploitive locked-in contracts with huge companies like Microsoft. Instead of Microsoft having to win over tens of thousands of individual schools, Microsoft only has to win over a few people at the top of the beurocracy. Bribing and misleading tens of thousands of IT people, all across the country would be prohibitivly difficult and expensive, where as bribing and misleading a few high officials costs virtually nothing when you are talking the huge potential profits.
Big government contracts, and big government policies, are naturally prone to extreme amounts of corruption and exploitation, because the stakes are so high and because authority are so centralized. You have to fight Microsoft on the level of the federal government, which is going to be impossible for your average parent. An average parent can walk over and talk to the head IT guy at the local school, or make an appoitment with the local municipal superintendant or mayor - But the average person can't fly off to meet with the head of the Ministry of Education, or the Prime Minister.
Don't blame Microsoft for this problem - they are simply exploiting the natural flaws in the educational leviatian. If they were gone, another company would simply find another way to exploit the system.
The problem with BECTA is that while they have in the past said "open source is a good thing" and today "MS lock-in is bad" etc., they are responsible for setting school's purchasing policies. And these purchasing policies are not F/OSS-friendly, since purchasing can only be made from "approved" suppliers. These suppliers need to apply for the (costly, I believe) approval process. This indirectly excludes many suppliers who would provide F/OSS options.
At least one UK MP (Member of Parliament) has raised an Early Day Motion drawing attention to the fact that this is a bad thing - this motion has been signed by more than 100 MPs following a reasonably active campaign by technical individuals in the UK. If you're in the UK, write to your MP asking them to sign it!
For some more background and also the letters I've written to my MP, see my blog: my opening letter and my followup.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
If you'd read the article you would have noticed that the "Lock In" comes from the costs associated with backing out of the agreement. Also Schools are charged for all computers that could run Microsoft software including Mac, which is one thing the report cites as unfair.