M$ stranglehold in the educational field

[Patrick]

Good blog post about the issue:
http://beginlinux.wordpress.com/2008/10 ... microsoft/

[eddie]

At the college level, where I used to work, Instructors would get free textbooks and ninety-nine percent of the time those textbooks have software that only ran on windows. And the educational programs for the disciplines are pretty much only for Windows. There is plenty of educational software for the young ones, but little for the college level. So windows had to be a part of the curriculum. I know when I taught, the original test making programs were written on the c=64 and apple. Eventually test making programs were written for pc's only for dos and windows. Another problem was that IT people spent gobs of money on becoming MS certified. That is what they were going to use in it environment. It is still that way to a degree. They were inbred into Microsoft so to speak. Ironically I remember when "word perfect" was the word processor to use, but the younger secretaries were brought up on MS word and that is what they wanted on their desktops. Even in the departments that taught Computer Science, they wanted Microsoft so they could get the big bucks for teaching "Mouse" and the other MSCE certifications. They did teach linux as a unix environment, but it was low on the totem pole. In fact the unix instructors were a joke. They would just teach the gui of gnome. The CS instructors also too spent big bucks to get the certifications and were going to stay in that direction. Students taking computer science and programming classes were allowed to purchase windows xp as well as other products from Microsoft directly for five dollars or so. All this is a hard title wave to overcome. When I was a computer tech I know I suggested using open source to save money. I would send emails with urls about open source to the high management for them to look at about how using open source saved money. The MS ingrained IT staff took real offense to this when they found out and put me on the blacklist to be eventually terminated without a reason. I also think some of them had their hands greased, but I could never prove it. I guess they felt the high paying cushy jobs were in danger. Ironically the unix admin who administered the sunos environment for Banner (college financial and do it all program) was a mac user and looked down on open source also. You could not win trying to push open source.