How Microsoft Beats GNU/Linux In Schools

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."

Comments

Or

[jayhawk88]

Schools prefer to use Windows because it's what the vast majority of their faculty and staff know, it's what the vast majority of their software runs on, and it's what students will encounter on the vast majority of computers they will use in the real world.

Re:Or

[slugtastic]

And why is that? Because Microsoft has a monopoly over the market.

Re:Or

[the_enigma_1983]

Or maybe the vast majority of [the worlds] software runs on [Windows], and [Windows is] what students will encounter on the vast majority of computers they will use in the real world because that is what schools have used, and how Microsoft helped build their monopoly.

Re:Or

[mikael_j]

Actually, UNIX used to be for anything "serious" along with VMS (Workstations, minicomputers and general server duties), not just "small time" or "server oriented".

A large part of what happened was that MS managed to gain market share by 1) Widespread piracy and 2) Being not nearly as good as the UNIX systems but also a lot cheaper. Point no. 2 is also why a lot of us who remember the days of MS-DOS, Win 2.x/3.x and other horrors may grudgingly admit that Microsoft's current operating system offerings are usable but still prefer *nix systems, because MS "won" by fighting dirty...

/Mikael

Re:Or

[onefriedrice]

I think you're suggesting that Microsoft "gained" their monopoly fair and square. As if "apparently people liked [Windows]."

Unfortunately, that's not very apparent at all. Apple had a viable, easy-to-use operating system at the same time. It eventually became outdated, yet it had a lot going for it including some nice killer apps (desktop publishing for one). You can't simply shrug that off as 'people just liked Windows better' unless you know what you're talking about.

In actuality, Microsoft gained its monopoly using questionably dubious, but well documented, business tactics, and now they use that OS monopoly in yet more questionable and dubious ways. This is generally known and accepted, but maybe your "apparently people liked [Windows]" comment isn't so well supported.

Re:Or

[turbidostato]

"Schools prefer to use Windows because it's what the vast majority of their faculty and staff know, it's what the vast majority of their software runs on, and it's what students will encounter on the vast majority of computers they will use in the real world."

I can accept points one and two but point three, "it's what students will encounter on the vast majority of computers they will use in the real world" is and always has been total utter bullshit. Whatever the students are using now will have only minor correlation to whatever they'll found in "the real world" few years from now. When I were in school it were the days of Microsoft DOS. How much does it resembles Windows Vista to Microsoft DOS except that there's "Microsoft" in the name? Is it really so much similar Windows 98 to Windows Vista than it is to current versions of Gnome or KDE upon Linux?

In fact, the reverse is truer: whatever I learnt about DOS on my school days serves me nothing on current versions of Microsoft OS and apps. On the other hand, what I learnt on my university days about NFS, X Window, DNS, SMTP, Vi... is still serving me now almost word by word about fifteen years later. And this is not per chance: Microsoft, being the principal actor and living out of selling licenses is *forced* to add new features and change the way of doing things just "to stay the same" while others, specially if not competing on selling usage licenses, can maintain whatever is already working just the same for ages.

Teachers

[religious freak]

Um, I think one of the perhaps very good reasons they don't use Linux is because the teachers are clueless as to how to use it.

Yeah, mark me as troll, but it's F'in true.

Re:Teachers

[frank_adrian314159]

Um, I think one of the perhaps very good reasons they don't use Linux is because the teachers are clueless as to how to use it.

Um, I think that the teachers are pretty clueless as to how to use Windows, too. I'd almost go as far as saying they're pretty clueless on how to run any hardware more advanced than hamster cages, but they generally can get students to do that for them.

Not to denigrate teachers - they are fine at what they're actually trained to do (i.e., teach), but most of them are the "typical computer user" (read clueless).

Re:Apps!

[at_slashdot]

Totally agree, people are interested in applications not in operating systems.

Re:Product dumping

[postbigbang]

It's not the operating system that pays, it's the sum of platform applications and infrastructure where Microsoft makes money, coupled to the students that know nothing else but Windows. The tip of the iceberg is Windows. The cash cows are Office, SQL Server, Exchange, and the add-ons, upgrades, and other platform products.

You don't 'lose' to Linux, you lose revenue that represents lots of infrastructure, server licenses, CALs, and so on.

There are few professional organizations that can do an end-to-end Linux infrastructure for educational needs (including school administration software costs) but the list is growing, if by populism alone.

Part of Microsoft's loss is the horrible security problems of 1998-2007, as they're less than before. That damage hurt Microsoft-- coupled to support costs for the products. Macs have always been a fractional part of the educational market, and Apple's done a lot to damage their own relationships with schools-- but students love them.

Microsoft has a lot to learn about love, rather than feigning leadership.

Re:Or ... it could be that MS gives it away!

[drsmithy]

A couple or so years ago, I asked a university lecturer why they used so much MS software, when the obviously had knowledge of Linux and Unix -- the reply was something like "we get it free" (or perhaps "almost free").

So they were using it because it was better ? Because they certainly wouldn't have been paying more for Linux or UNIX...

Re:Product dumping

[Gerzel]

Adding the word objective to your argument does not make it any more objective.

You need to show WHY it is objectively more or less of a monopoly than the Law says and ALSO show why we should consider your definition of monopoly rather than the legal one.

Objectively strangling an infant or elderly person should be less of a crime than strangling a young adult because the young adult is harder to replace than the infant and has more to provide to society in terms of man-hours work.

While objectivity can help justice; justice is not necessarily objective

Re:Apps!

[Mr Z]

This is something of a chicken and egg problem isn't there? I don't recall Windows having any sort of natural advantage when I was in school. It was all Apple ][s, except in the business department where they had some PS/2s running MS-DOS. A couple people thought Windows was interesting, but nobody was in a hurry to switch.

All of this Windows software has developed through the traditional "network effect," and that was nurtured through programs such as Microsoft's that put Windows on many desktops throughout the 90s. That doesn't mean it can't be brought to Linux someday, though. There has to be some demand before it happens. Either that, or some open source efforts to replace the poorly-written software that you mention.

Re:Product dumping

[diegocgteleline.es]

Indeed, and consider how MUCH money on training Microsoft gets for free when public schools teach with Microsoft products.

It's not just the license. It's all the taxes you pay to train your own childs for the benefit of a private company.

and OLPC/Negroponte will still think MSFT is good

[Locutus]

it shows that nothing has changed at Microsoft in the past 20 years. There is no "new Microsoft", there is no "kinder, gentler Microsoft", and there is no "Microsoft is a friend to open source".

It's all a lie for the purpose of furthering their goal of making sure Windows is the only OS for the vast majority of the populations.

surprise!

LoB

Re:Product dumping

[gustar]

Macs are the main competition to Windows, not Linux.

I do not think that is true. Plenty of people and organizations use Linux on the desktop/laptop.

With Linux (or say FreeBSD) you can deliver a functional platform with *all* of the applications a typical (and not so typical user) needs for *no* acquisition cost.

Definitely an attractive value proposition which continues to attract attention.

Re:More Microsoft is Doomed Retric

[maugle]

I don't know about you, but my newspapers constantly have articles on how the schools have no budget and the teachers are poor and the buildings are falling apart and yadda yadda yadda.
You'd think they'd jump at a chance to save some cash, no matter how little.

I put Microsoft's continued dominance down to momentum ("everybody uses Microsoft products") and fear ("if I decide to save some cash by moving from Windows to Linux, but the migration fails, we'll be out a lot of time and money and I'll be out on the street").

Re:Product dumping

[0100010001010011]

The main competition to Windows Is Windows N-1.

Re:Dumping.

[gustar]

Who says they Microsoft has the edge? Where I work we hire a number of kids out of college, *all* of them have higher degree of comfort implementing various solutions on a Linux/BSD platform then Windows. That tells me they are getting a tremendous amount of exposure to these platforms during their college years.

Quite frankly I manage to do my own job quite effectively without having to rely on Microsoft products at all, this includes technical aspects as well communicating, documenting, etc.

So by all means use the tools you are comfortable with, but do not imply that they are the only choice for the *real world* when that is not even close to being the case.

Re:Product dumping

[Bert64]

Teaching specific apps in schools is a poor idea, since by the time these kids venture into the workplace the apps they used in school will be horrendously obsolete and no longer used... I used wordperfect (for dos) in school, and before that we had acorn archimedes systems running riscos and some apps i forget the name of.

What the schools use isn't important, because whatever they use will be different from what people have to use after school. How they teach is what matters, teach general concepts rather than specific apps.

Re:Product dumping

[silanea]

Thanks for your post. Though I strongly disagree with the following part:

[...] If you can use one operating system, it is (and should be) Windows. For younger students, the school's objective is to teach computer literacy, so they want to have Windows computers. For older students, the school's objective is to use them as a tool and not have to worry about showing the classroom idiot how to use GNOME, so they want to have Windows computers. [...]

Conditioning someone to click at certain screen elements to achieve a certain effect is software training, not an exercise in computer literacy. Computer literacy would be to teach students the concepts and paradigms behind modern software. Then they could find their way around Windows, OS X and Linux by themselves (with a little help from the respective manuals) - by understanding what the hell they are doing instead of mere repetitive training. Basic concepts are shared amongst all mayor desktops: Some kind of menu-based application launcher, a bar that collects open windows, a file manager...they have different names and look (more or less) different in each OS, but GNOME's application menu applies the same paradigms as Windows' Start menu.

Many companies who want to ditch the Windows eco-system or at least parts like MS Office face enormous obstacles in their employees' computer illiteracy. They may know the Office toolbars by heart, but they cannot transfer their knowledge to competing applications because they don't really understand what button X does. Microsoft rewards training over understanding. And that alone should be reason enough to make it unfit for educational use.