Windows Cheap Enough For $2B Aussie Laptop Deal

An anonymous reader writes "Windows-based netbooks aren't too expensive to be ruled out of the Aussie government's billion dollar promise to give a laptop to every school-aged child, according to several education departments. The admission follows an earlier report that open source machines based on Ubuntu or Mandriva are the only option to deliver up to four million computers to students for under $2 billion. Microsoft itself claimed it will keep costs per unit down by hosting a lot of the educational software in the cloud rather than on the netbook devices."

Comments

Re:What a great alternative

[FishWithAHammer]

spend whatever you're saving on some Tux-savvy teachers.

And how many of those exist, exactly? The answer is "not very many."

Face it--Linux remains difficult to use (I say this as an OSS contributor, myself, with a lot of *nix time under my belt). The retraining would be expensive, quite potentially more expensive than any Microsoft infrastructure, and the users would still in all likelihood complain that it's Not Windows. You'd have to have a very compelling reason to force a switch to something nobody uses and nobody wants in order to justify user pushback and retraining costs.

That reason does not, at present, exist. Maybe it will in the future, and I hope it does, but at present it simply isn't there. Sorry. Quit evangelizing and get back to improving the product and maybe that reason will be there.

Re:M$'s software = free when unwanted

[FishWithAHammer]

"Unwanted"? Bullshit. Windows is a better choice here because the teachers and the students are already accustomed to it. How many teachers and students out there want Linux? Very few, I'd wager. The cost savings would fall under the problems of retraining and user resistance/pushback. It's just not a smart move.

Now, if you lot did less evangelization and more making Linux an excellent desktop, maybe people would want it. The contribution of code is worth a lot more than "BAWWW NOBODY WANTS OUR SHIT!".

Re:Teachers were probably the reason.

[ErkDemon]

This is NO different than Windows or OSX. Once those boxes are set up and networked, there is VERY little a teacher needs to do that'd require anything above "user" level.

I dunno, there's a lots more people out there with decent Windows problem-solving skills than the equivalent Linux knowledge. And despite what some people say, there's still parts of linux that aren't as suitable for newbies.

For instance, I was setting up someone's Asus Eee recently, and they were fairly new to the whole windows-icon-mouse thing. The default Eee installation comes with a stupid colour scheme that's all shades of grey - the active window has a grey title strip, the inactive windows have grey title strips, and the interiors of the windows are (of course) grey ... Stupid.

So I figure, no problem, I'll change the default colour scheme to match another computer they used recently. On Windows you just right-click the desktop, a dialog box pops us, you click a tab, and then you select window components and their display properties.

On this version of Linux, you couldn't do it. You couldn't even access alternative Windows schemes unless you opened a terminal window and typed in a load of command-link junk.

And while there were window schemes that the authors were probably very proud of, none of them had the particular colours that I wanted to use. So a simple job that took less than a minute on Windows ended up taking a few hours of R&D, and still wasn't completed satisfactorily. I ended up reading programming specs for raw configuration files before I had an attack of sanity and decided that I was wasting far too much time, and gave up.

One of the first things that many people will want to do when they get a netbook is to change the size of the default window titlebar font, to free up more screen space for documents. Good luck with that if the thing's running the version of linux that comes with the Eee...

I mean, eventually, Linux is going to have all these user-friendly features by default, but it doesn't have them yet, and I can quite see how the people whose job is going to be supporting these things might prefer to stick with "the devil they know" OS for a little bit longer. Depends on exactly how low MS are prepared to go on price.

I guess a good bargaining strategy might be to decide on Ooo rather than MSO, then meet with an MS rep, and say, "We're thinking of going completely over to open source, as a matter of government policy, starting with these student machines. But before we do that, we thought it'd only be fair to ask you guys ... how much would MS be prepared to pay us to put Windows on instead?"

Start with a negative price "It's advertising", and consider using XP if the final negotiated price is zero or negative.

Re:The Pusher

[ozmanjusri]

That metaphor applies to companies you like, too.

No, not when those companies supply open and interoperable products.

It's like saying Microsoft's shit stinks or Microsoft's morning breath is bad.

I've used their shit, and yeah, it frequently stinks. I don't know what you've been doing to be able to smell their morning breath though. When most of us say Microsoft screws its customers and partners, we mean it metaphorically...