Why Buy Microsoft Milk When the Google Cow Is Free?

theodp writes "Touring a high school with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt informed students they're eating Google 'dog food' because Microsoft's costs money. 'Why would we use Google Docs over like Microsoft Word?' a teacher asked the class. 'Because it's free!' exclaimed a grinning Schmidt. 'Schmidt's comment,' writes GeekWire's Blair Hanley Frank, 'highlights one of the risks Microsoft faces in the academic world. While Microsoft has started offering schools incentives to use Office 365, including free licenses for their pupils, the company is under greater pressure from its competitors. As more schools like Chicago's face budget shortfalls, free and discounted products from companies like Google and Apple, especially when attached to financial assistance, start looking better and better.' Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."

Comments

Apple?

[Frankie70]

While Microsoft has started offering schools incentives to use Office 365, including free licenses for their pupils, the company is under greater pressure from its competitors. As more schools like Chicago's face budget shortfalls, free and discounted products from companies like Google and Apple, especially when attached to financial assistance, start looking better and better

Why does Apple look better?

Re: Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

'No extra charge' requires a significant up-front investment, which covers the extras (as they only come with new, and not old, machines, and thus are included in the price - regardless of marketing). Google's variation on 'free' isn't without its own drawbacks, but it doesn't require handing them money directly.

Re:Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple recently made their iWork office suite free.
New Macs now come with it pre-installed.
That's a pretty good deal compared to the prices for MS office:
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store?Action=html&Locale=en_US&SiteID=msusa&icid=Office_4up_Link_OfficeSuites_8_2_13&pbpage=OfficeCompare

Re: Apple?

[NotDrWho]

The car costs $30,000, sir. But we throw in the engine for free!

Re:Apple?

[Bacon Bits]

Why does Apple look better?

Because they can undercut initial bids to induce vendor lock-in and sell tons of hardware.

The drawback, of course, is that your school's IT department will only have the following conversation:

IT: Hey, we're having trouble with managing these iPads--
Apple: Sorry, iPads are not an enterprise product. It's not designed to be managed centrally.
IT: But you sold us 6,000 of these iPads and told us they would work great in our schools.
Apple: Yes, but it's not an enterprise product. We don't support any kind of central management.
IT: But... each iPad needs an Apple ID, and lots of apps use the ID as the user's name. But the ID can't be changed easily. How are we supposed to create and update 6,000 Apple IDs every year? And there's no way to stop the students from resetting the iPad, particularly if they know the Apple ID.
Apple: We're sorry, but iPads are a consumer product.
IT: But you said they work great in schools.
Apple: Yes, they do. Kids and teachers love them!
IT: Don't you understand the use case for a school? Didn't you even try to?
Apple: Schools are full of people. People are consumers. Consumers buy our products. Consumers love our products. See, it's very simple!

Re:Apple?

[gnasher719]

Nice conversation, but it neglects to mention that Apple has indeed tools to support the use of iPads in controlled environments, including school and enterprise.

Re:Apple?

[maccodemonkey]

Apple: Sorry, iPads are not an enterprise product. It's not designed to be managed centrally.

Ahem.

http://enterpriseios.com/wiki/...

Citation: I used to work in Apple IT management.

Apple's device management isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than Android's and ChromeOS's (which provide little to none.)

Not the only reason.....

[jythie]

Both my private and work machines both have MSOffice on them and I still use Google Docs for the bulk of my writing. It is light weight, easy to use, accessible from anywhere, and easy to share with collaborators. Office 365 is a bit better in some of those regards, but still makes collaborating with external entities more difficult.

Re:Not the only reason.....

[rtb61]

Should schools pay for M$ or take Google's privacy invasive stuff free or is there a third choice. Should the federal provide free open source software under federal core program. Software that is free, has been audited for quality and security, software that is free of privacy invasive elements during and after school use. If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day. Niether M$ nor Google is the answer, they just both keep the problem going, year after year after year, instead of permanently solving the problem with something like https://www.libreoffice.org/.

Re:Not the only reason.....

[alphatel]

Should schools pay for M$ or take Google's privacy invasive stuff free or is there a third choice. Should the federal provide free open source software under federal core program. Software that is free, has been audited for quality and security, software that is free of privacy invasive elements during and after school use. If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day. Niether M$ nor Google is the answer, they just both keep the problem going, year after year after year, instead of permanently solving the problem with something like https://www.libreoffice.org/.

Dude, stop making sense.

Re:Not the only reason.....

[njnnja]

Although FOSS alternatives keep getting better, they are still (generally) not as easy to set up and use as commercial alternative. On the other hand, to an institution whose entire purpose is to teach people skills, getting them to understand a computer as more than just a glorified typewriter and electronic encyclopedia is a feature, not a bug.

On the third hand, that might encourage a child's natural curiosity and send them learning about things that are not in the syllabus, which can only hurt the school's standardized test scores. So never mind.

Re:Not the only reason.....

[SuricouRaven]

Of course they could, if they were targeting me. But it's beyond the reach of any automated advertising-data-gathering system, and cannot be easily tied to the social media identity of anyone who downloads from it it. If anyone wants to spy, they'll have to get an actual human to do the job.

Re:Not the only reason.....

[jellomizer]

There is still the Free Software Stigma. Especially for desktop software.
For the most part their arguments against it are rather irrational however, they are persistent.

Argument 1: Free Software comes with no one to sue if things go bad. Now granted MS,Google and the others have a rather iron clad ULA. But it is like the lottery if something happens that there is a gap in the ULA then bang they can sue for damages.

Argument 2: No official support. Now granted there are a lot of online resources, and companies willing to support the products. However there isn't that nice and comfy feeling that you can get the guys from the main source to come in and get things going for you.

Argument 3: Compatibility/Not widely used. Now many open source tools are more widely used then people think, and many tools are very compatible, often more compatible then the upgraded version of the commercial product. However there is that fear that I am the one who is using the next BetaMax in software. For education in technology they incorrectly think teaching people to use office will train the kids to work in business... However it is often the case the products themselves will be so out of date when they graduate that the office only features would be so different that they need to relearn them.

To expand on argument 3. When I was a kid my school felt it was important to avoid Mac's and focus more on PCs with MS DOS. For the fact that MS DOS based systems were the market leader. However, by the time I graduated Windows has taken over So all the skills learned on using a Mac would have transitioned better then using DOS (Especially the dos training was, read the label and run the .EXE, .BAT, or .COM file). While the Mac training had you using more OS features such as copying files, windows management.

Re:Not the only reason.....

[FireFury03]

Both my private and work machines both have MSOffice on them and I still use Google Docs for the bulk of my writing. It is light weight, easy to use, accessible from anywhere, and easy to share with collaborators. Office 365 is a bit better in some of those regards, but still makes collaborating with external entities more difficult.

I don't buy the "people use $foo instead of Office because $foo is free" - we've had plenty of free alternatives to office for years and whilest the likes of OpenOffice are used by indiciduals, they seem rarely used by schools and businesses.

In fact, I can cite a couple of examples: a (teacher) friend of mine started using OpenOffice to teach kids how to use a word processor. His reason was that the community he works in is pretty poor and running OpenOffice on some old hardware is more within the financial grasp of those families. Once the local authority found out about it he was very quickly made to stop and use MS Office instead. (One wonders *why* he was made to stop - you could suggest that it was just jobsworths not wanting anyone to do anything "non-standard". Cynically I suspect the authority get a cut of MS licence fees and didn't liek the idea of losing that money).

A second example: the utterly pointless "european computer driving licence" doesn't actually mandate any specific software. However, the exam boards do: most of the "computer driving licence" courses *require* the students to be using Exchange (and I've seen a number of schools migrate from perfectly functional non-Microsoft mail systems to Exchange simply because that course requires it).

My personal opinion is that if any kind of IT course requires people to use a *specific* piece of software, rather than simply any software with certain capabilities, then there's something terribly wrong with the course. I don't think its any good for society to teach people by rote how to use a specific bit of software rather than giving them the skills to figure out any bit of software that is put in front of them.

Re:Not the only reason.....

[Collective 0-0009]

As someone that recently switched an entire plant to LibreOffice (plant, not office), let me tell you why those arguments are crap.

1: When is the last time anyone with less than 1000 employees was able to sue a software manufacturer for damages? I want someone with personal experience, not a link. It's just not realistic. Besides, why would you sue over a productivity suite... it's not a customer ERP system?

2: How many times have you needed to contact MS support for an issue with Word? Even Outlook doesn't need support, Exchange does. There is no need for official support for 99% of uses of productivity software.

3: This one gains some traction. That's why I only tried the switch in the plant where none of the users had any idea they were using "MS Office" or "Libre Office". They are mostly consumers of information, and that's pretty easy to switch to another version. Also I recently had to install Libre in the office so a user could open really old .123 files. It's actually better for compatibility. But still not quite widely used.

Feel free to use any of those if you need to explain why you are installing free software instead of paying $300 per seat.

Pay more in taxes

[fey000]

" ...Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes ..."

Wouldn't they have to pay taxes first?

dangerous assumption

[Chrisq]

Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."

She is making a dangerous assumption that if tax revenues increased the extra would be spent on schools

Similarly...

[msauve]

Why use Google Apps when LibreOffice is not only economically free, but spyware free?

Re:Similarly...

[Anonymous Coward]

School administrators are as thick as horseshit. They are not proactive; they only learn things when other people make pretty presentations and suggest benefits that sound good, despite not necessarily being the best for the school. Google and Microsoft are known companies, with huge marketing budgets and lobbying power. LibreOffice is developed by... who? Do you even know? I'll tell you who - a non-profit called The Document Foundation, an organization that I doubt most LO users would even know existed. Not to discredit their hard work of course, but they have virtually no marketing budget and clout. How do you compete with the big guys in making your product an alternative? Word of mouth? Hah!

We know about LO because we're geeks and software is our interest. School admins are not, and instead listen to "trusted" businesses to pitch their products. LO has no chance, because of our fucked up world.

Re:Similarly...

[bickerdyke]

The matter of trust is a personal descision here which I'll simply respect.

But the example with the document sharing is a strawmen, as sharing secret document on a cloud drive with the wrong person is as easy as emailing the same document from a non-cloud storage to the wrong person.

Re:Similarly...

[Pumpkin Tuna]

I work in K12 education trying to help teachers integrate technology. The answer to your question is more complicated than you think. Google Apps make sense for us because we have a ton of users (students) who move between different devices throughout the course of a day. With Google Drive, Sites, calendar and mail, their stuff follows them around.

Best yet, it's free. And it's actually more free than LibreOffice. There's nothing to download and nearly nothing to maintain. We have to make sure our devices have Chrome installed and we have one guy who manages the domain and keeps the database of users and passwords working for 56 schools and associated administrators, teachers and employees. As long as our network stays up, we don't have a problem, and most school systems these days have a pretty robust network connection and infrastructure, so long as they are spending their federal e-rate money wisely.

On the privacy side, Google has language in their Apps domain contracts that protects student data. Is is perfect? Probably not, but it falls in the "good enough" category.

We are still transition to Google. There are lots of teachers and students who use MS Office more than Google, but it's a process. If I had my way, we would continue the transition and then ditch MS Office completely in a few years, replacing it with Libre as a backup for those times when you have to have a workstation-based office suite. This has the potential to save a massive amount of money and yet still be MORE effective than what we were doing.

Bespoke Handcrafted Libre

[ei4anb]

"rather than relying on their charity or free software" - Sigh!

The FOSS movement should work to educate such people. Perhaps we should call it Bespoke Handcrafted Libre FOSS because some people equate "free" with "cheap and nasty"

No price != No cost

[sjbe]

'Why would we use Google Docs over like Microsoft Word?' a teacher asked the class. 'Because it's free!' exclaimed a grinning Schmidt.

It is NOT free. It might not involve a cash outlay but Google isn't providing Google Docs out of the goodness of their heart. You are paying with personal information that they can then sell to others who want to advertise to you. You are trading Google something, it's just not cash. Nothing wrong with that in principle but Eric Schmidt pretending there is no cost is disingenuous. When making this deal with teachers to get personal information of minors it's borderline creepy.

Re:No price != No cost

[upside]

This is the point that hasn't sunken into the people who use Google services. You are not the customer.

The advertisers are the customer and you are the product.

Good enough

[ledow]

Free isn't as important as "good enough". Just because something's free doesn't mean we all dive into it - it has to be *AT LEAST* good enough as well.

The problem MS has is that things like Google Apps for Education"good enough" for almost everyone's uses and - to schools - free. I've put entire schools onto it. Why not? Gigabytes of "always up" storage, accessible from web, PC, Android, etc. Gigabyte-sized inboxes with one of the best email services around (GMail). Integration into your AD if you desire but also manual / CSV user/group management. Enforced signatures on email, group permissioning, all kinds of integration and automation, and switching to them is just a matter of changing your MX record once on any domain you'd like them to handle (and you can always change it back).

Google Apps so that people can work from home on the same documents they created in school. No need to spend fortunes on Office licensing just so that that temporary, occasional member of staff can edit a document.

Google Calendar, which does 99% of whatever I've seen people actually use Exchange calendaring for, with unlimited calendars, no licence fees, no software installation, no onerous browser requirements, no need to expose your servers to the world.

I've seen schools do most of their timetabling through Google Calendar - it's free and good enough, such that they haven't bothered to look for alternatives because, well, why? They don't have any problems with what it does or does not do.

That's before you even get into Google Pages, all the other stuff they offer and their Android device management (which is great - set policies, install apps and remote wipe Android devices remotely for everything in your Google "domain").

Sure, there are power-users somewhere that have problems with it - I am a school network manager and I certainly had other things that I used and just used, say, IMAP or iCal formats to put the data into the things I wanted it in, but hell - for 99.9% of my users it was more than good enough and, because we were a school, free. I've even seen a much larger school use it just to clear some space on their servers so they don't have to upgrade RAID. Give everyone 5Gb of Drive storage and suddenly all that junk they "must have" on their accounts isn't as important any more.

And, if you ask, they will guarantee that your data stays under EU control - and they have a standard EULA that states just that or schools in the EU wouldn't be able to touch them.

Free is one thing, but Google Apps etc. is good enough that I've actually paid for it (more storage etc.) in the past and would pay again for it in the future. But there are numerous places I've worked where "free" and "more than good enough" are the terms that won the decision. Even in places with annually recurring MS licenses under educational licensing deals anyway.

Google Docs Not Free as in Freedom

[Eravnrekaree]

Google Docs is not free. Ask Stallman about this. The code is closed source and off limits to anyone except the anointed ones at Google. You never know if Google will data mine your data, basically you have given all of your sensitive data over to google.

A truly free package would be LibreOffice, open source, and which does not demand you hand over all of your data over an internet connection to Google's grid.