Microsoft Brings Its Embrace-Extend-Extinguish Game To K-12 Schools?

theodp writes: A year after it paid $2.5 billion to buy Minecraft, Microsoft has announced a partnership with Code.org that makes a Minecraft-themed introduction to programming a signature tutorial of this year's Hour of Code, which hopes to reach 200 million schoolchildren next month in what the Microsoft-funded nonprofit is billing as the largest learning event in history. "A core part of our mission to empower every person on the planet is equipping youth with computational thinking and problem-solving skills to succeed in an increasingly digital world," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a press release, which also notes that "Microsoft is gifting Windows Store credit to every educator who organizes an Hour of Code event worldwide." Of the Minecraft tutorial, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi gushed, "Compared to what you would otherwise be doing for school, this is, like, the best thing ever."

Comments

Clickbait title?

[jarich]

Where's the embrace and extinguish?

Re:Clickbait title?

[ShanghaiBill]

Its Microsoft, thats more than enough for some people to FUD the place up...

My kid's elementary school has an after school class where the kids write Minecraft plugins in Python. The kids enjoy it, and even the girls like it since Minecraft involves mostly building rather than just boy-oriented destruction. I don't see how this creates any lock-in for Microsoft, since the skills are portable, and Microsoft doesn't control Python. Microsoft may get some small advantage from this, but the kids benefit more.

Wait, Google and Apple don't do this?

[Isca]

Last time I looked Apple was constantly offering discounted iPads and apple products to lock schools and minds into the apple ecosystem.

Last time I looked Google was constantly offering discounted chromebooks and pushing schools into the google ecosystem, especially with gmail and google docs.

I'm sick and tired of the Microsoft is evil crap. Yes, 20 years ago they tried to embrace, extend and extinguish their standards over open standards to the entire internet. But they didn't win. The average consumer is not a microsoft consumer, they are a Apple or Google consumer.

So what did Microsoft do? They determined their core market was Office and Servers (through azure). Everything they've done over the past few years has been geared towards furthering those goals. Windows 10 is mostly a ploy to put those two platforms first, in the same way Google and Apple serve to put their platforms first.

But you know what's different? Microsoft is more open than they've ever been, ever. Heck, their Azure cloud service even has first rate support for running your favorite flavor of linux on their servers. They've open sourced much of their codebase for C# and have been focused on allowing their system to write code for themselves and any of their competitors.

Of course they are going to lean towards supporting their own systems and will make changes to the root of the product to enhance their other offerings. They are a for-profit corporation, just like Google and Apple. But they've been far more open and less heavy handed than those two in the last 5 years.

Re:Wait, Google and Apple don't do this?

[Penguinisto]

I'm sick and tired of the Microsoft is evil crap. Yes, 20 years ago they tried to embrace, extend and extinguish their standards over open standards to the entire internet. But they didn't win. The average consumer is not a microsoft consumer, they are a Apple or Google consumer.

Depends on how "consumer" is defined. The vast majority of tablets and phones belong to the Apple/Google duopoly, hands-down. However, the majority of home computers/laptops are definitely still running Windows, and in spite of Microsoft's efforts to drive them off with their latest UI, there's no indication that too many folks are going to budge off of Windows anytime soon. Meanwhile XBox still dukes it out with Playstation, and seems to be holding its own in that arena.

I guess I'm just saying that you may have been a wee bit too simplistic on that one...

You are right in that Microsoft relies on the trinity of Office/Exchange/Desktops as their bread-and-butter (everything else they sell is ancillary to these, including SCOM/SCCM, SharePoint, Windows Server and SQL Server... because without the aforementioned threesome, who the hell would need that other crap in the server room?) That said? Outside of the XBox, they've not really made much in the way of inroads in the past decade or so (and in the XBox's case, has that thing actually reached any kind of usable ROI yet, or is it still in the R&D loss-leader cost hole?)

But they've been far more open and less heavy handed than those two in the last 5 years.

Maybe more open and less heavy-handed than they used to be, but IMHO neither Apple or Google can touch Microsoft's level of EEE. Also, Microsoft has become kinder/gentler on the interoperability front *only* for two reasons:

1) because they got their asses handed to them in mobile, and
2) because the other two big players (Apple, Google) are currently making serious inroads into the hearts and minds of consumers, both at work and home ...and this means Microsoft is being forced to play nice these days by necessity. After all, you don't see them playing nice when it comes to consoles, do you?