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How Microsoft Beats GNU/Linux In Schools

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the doing-battle-like-an-insider dept.

twitter writes "Ever wonder why schools still use Windows? Boycott Novell has extracted the details from 2002 Microsoft email presented in the Comes vrs Microsoft case and other leaks. What emerges is Microsoft's desperate battle to 'never lose to Linux.' At stake for Microsoft is more than a billion dollars of annual revenue, vital user conditioning and governmental lock in that excludes competition, and software freedom for the rest of us. Education and Government Incentives [EDGI] and "Microsoft Unlimited Potential" are programs that allows vendors to sell Windows at zero cost. Microsoft's nightmare scenario has already been realized in Indiana and other places. Windows is not really competitive and schools that switch save tens of millions of dollars. Because software is about as expensive as the hardware in these deals, the world could save up to $500 million each year by dumping Microsoft. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's hard to see what Microsoft can do other than what they did to Peter Quinn."

4 of 476 comments (clear)

  1. Apps! by Jjeff1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of my customers is a K-12 school. They have 10K students, and 390 different windows applications.

    Most educational software simply isn't written for Linux. Most educational software is poorly written for Windows. Running as a non-admin user is always a hangup. I can't imagine trying to get all these apps to run under Wine. The chorus of "why don't we have windows" would be deafening.

    The reason Windows beats Linux in schools is because the apps they need, work under windows. When the superintendent wants an application, he gets it. No matter how poorly written or insecure it is, we always end up installing it. If linux is somehow responsible for it not working, linux gets tossed, 100% of the time.

    1. Re:Apps! by Yvanhoe · · Score: 5, Informative

      When Bob fail at math, Bob is bad at math. When Alice fails at math, girls are bad at math.
      When an application crashes under Windows, the application failed. When an application crashes under Linux, Linux fails.

      I may sound pompous, but the first bias is being fought by using techniques that could be used in the second as well. The most simple method that yields results is incredibly cheap : show people they have a bias. Most people don't like to feel that they are being sexist and try to correct their bias if they perceive it. Most people (especially teacher, where I live) don't like to feel they are doing the job of a corporate lackey, or helping a monopoly. Microsoft does have a bad rep, not only among geeks. People also don't like to feel that they are being cheated in paying too much for so few.

      That, and I was really impressed by wine progresses (under the standard Ubuntu install) these years. Most of your old Windows applications will work better under Ubuntu than under Vista. Even file sharing through netbios/samba worked more easily.

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
  2. Re:Can anyone explain the link? by domatic · · Score: 5, Informative

    A couple of years back, Massachusetts attempted to mandate open formats in state government. ODF was to be the office piece of this and MS pulled every dirty trick in the book to reverse or subvert that up to and including pulling strings to get the people pushing for this pressured to leave.

    I suggest "massachusetts odf" as better set of search terms for Google.

  3. rambling comments from a labtech... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I made the switch to Linux with Ubuntu because, for most things, it works just plain better than Windows. But, getting this point across to the people I work with is, well, proving rather difficult.

    Why is that? Because:

    1) People are gullible. The people that make decisions about purchasing first look at a glossy sales brochure or pick what they saw advertised on TV. Then they then ask "Is this okay?" Linux doesn't have any shiny brochures, we never get asked if it's okay.

    2) People are terrified of change, any change. They won't admit it, but they are. It's not that Linux is still harder to use than Windows (honestly, it's the other way around now, and I've proved it to people); it's that people don't want to change, even for the better.

    3) People are lazy. I had instructors DEMANDING that I dual-boot to Linux (so I used a VMware image instead) and then they went off to teach MS Office instead of Open-Office... because there's a course-pack/textbook that includes online testing and grading (so they don't have to do any work).

    In short, the problem is inertia. Unfortunately, Linux is going to have to get way better than Windows before the Educational "ship" can start to make some course corrections. Dumb, fearful, lazy people have to be beaten over the head with the obvious before they will change direction.

    Now, the appropriate tool to beat said people over the head with is a turn-key Linux distribution that integrates into an Active Directory domain, right out of the box. One that includes an image-casting process that allows 100s of computers to be managed (deployed, updated, etc.) from a central console (PXE boot, the works). If I had that (turn-key), I might make some progress around here... though it would still take a while.

    FOSS will eventually dominate education. It is inevitable. The Linux distributions out there are making phenomenal strides towards ease-of-use and overall functionality. In most aspects, they have already bested Windows. But, it will take time to overcome the inertia in Education. Honestly, I expect the business world will actually turn first. Education, despite its best efforts, is surprisingly conservative.

            David...