New Zealand Rejects Office For Macs

An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has declined to renew a licensing deal for MS Office on 25,000 Macintosh computers in the country's schools. The Education Minister has suggested that schools use the free alternative NeoOffice. The article quotes a school principal who pointed out that the NeoOffice website warns users to expect problems and bugs: 'That's not the sort of software we should be expecting kids in New Zealand to be using.'" Schools are free to buy their own copies of Office. A blog on the New Zealand Herald site argues that the Ministry should have paid Microsoft this time, but not renewed the deal and instead developed a transition plan to open source.

Comments

How much?

[igny]

How much do they save, and is there a way to invest some of this money into further development of NeoOffice?

Re:How much?

[Domstersch]

It's unclear how much money they save. The total licensing deals the government has made with Microsoft are speculated to be worth about NZ$100 million (US$72m) over the next ten years. But the Maharey, the Minister of Education, said the dispute was regarding NZ$2.7m worth of Microsoft Office licenses that would not (otherwise) be used (because the macs in question aren't currently using Office) but which Microsoft insisted the Ministry pay for.

So, we know they're saving more than $2.7m and less than $100m, but we're not told exactly how much.

By the way, macs aren't extensively used outside of primary (roughly, elementary schools) and intermediate (school years 7-8) in New Zealand. Every high school I can think of (many) have one or two macs at most, and classes full of PCs. So, to my mind, Le Sueur is wrong, and NeoOffice _is_ the sort of software we can expect kids to use. It's unreasonable to claim five to twelve year olds have a need for (supposedly) superior, high-class spreadsheets, databases and business presentations.

Maybe NZ government are just playing it smart!

[malsdavis]

If the experiences from U.K. councils and schools looking to ditch Office and Windows is anything to go by, Microsoft will probably return to the New Zealand government with an even better offer!

Microsoft are terrified of the thought of educational and public authorities ditching MS products as they know that successful operation of non-MS products in these sort of institutions will lead others - and ultimately corporations (their biggest market) - to consider alternatives.

Several U.K. local councils and schools pay virtually nothing for MS products to prevent them trialling Linux.

Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software?

[niiler]

And yet in actual practice, we have yet to encounter said bugs where I work. NeoOffice works just fine on the couple of Macs we have, thank you and should be quite a bit more than what 99.9% of students need. In practice when I used to be stuck on Windows, MS Office crashed if you removed the floppy disk before closing the document, or if you inserted pictures into nested tables, etc. Please don't get me started on Micro -Blue Screen of Death-Soft's stability issues. NeoOffice is an excellent alternative for the under-supported MacOS environment.

Wait until the teachers start complaining.

[zerofoo]

I'm the Network Manager for a small private school. Recently, our school was audited, and we found that we were short on our MS office licensing.

I proposed Open Office as a viable replacement for most of our machines. Administration would continue to use MS Office alongside of Open Office. The school's administration tried Open Office, and after a short learning curve, they liked the software. The only real complaint was that the menus were different from MS Office. Administration assumed that teaching "professionals" would learn the new software and continue on with their jobs.

It took an entire year, but the whole school was eventually migrated to Open Office, and it worked for most people. A few, very loud teachers, hated it.

Those very loud teachers made lots of noise - so much so that administration finally coughed up $11,000 for MS Office 2007.

After another lengthy deployment process, we had Office 2007 in place. Now the very loud teachers are complaining the new software is different from the old stuff.

You can't win with Teachers.

-ted

I use NeoOffice to work around MS Office bugs

[david.emery]

Several times recently I've been handed a PowerPoint file (from a Windows user) with graphics in it, that either fail to render, or worse that crash Microsoft PowerPoint. The files open just fine in NeoOffice... I've also used an old version of Keynote (1.1) to work around Microsoft PowerPoint bugs opening PowerPooint presentations...

          dave

Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software?

[drinkypoo]

I can't rule out that Windows prints a meaningless complaint about IRQ levels when the real cause is a bug somewhere else.

You know, hardware that utterly fails under one operating system can work flawlessly under another. They have different drivers. In almost all cases, windows drivers are binary blobs that are developed by the device manufacturer or someone they have retained under contract to do so for them. Most Linux drivers are reverse engineered or developed from specs and are open source drivers which come with the kernel.

In practice, either one might be more reliable; if the Linux driver isn't very good, which is often the case (it can be hard to write a good, stable driver without specs) then it might not work under Linux properly, but be fine under Windows. If the Windows driver is a pile of crap, it might work better under Linux.

For example, my last desktop system was an Athlon XP 2500+ with a Radeon 9600XT. The system would bluescreen on boot if I had the catalyst control center installed. But once I booted up in safe mode and removed CCC, the driver worked "fine" (it still sucked - we're talking about ATI here. but no bluescreens.) Some people just can't write a fucking driver.