Yeah, there’s a certain “Duh!” about the headline…
The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.
The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.
The article is on the BBC News site. The reasons being:
a spokesman for Becta said the problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licences for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else.
Finally BECTA get off their ass and do something about it. This was news back in 2002 before I had even started up Mac-Sys. One school I had dealings with (as a free consultant) was that they were being forced to go for a 3-5 year deal where they needed to pay for every PC in the building despite NONE of them being able to run Windows XP (most of them struggled with Windows 95) and the remainder being Macs. Yet the advisor from the board said they would have to pay for Office and XP for every computer whether it was capable of running the software or not. This would include whether the machine was running older versions of Windows, Mac OS or Linux.
Never mind the absolute hash that Classroom 2000 became where teachers found that their laptops were suddenly not covered under labour costs and so many lost their laptops altogether. And installations were often left half-completed (the school I was dealing with had their school rooms HALF-CABLED and I went in and did a patch job so they could actually use the network). Schools may also be better off buying their own ADSL connection and a NetNanny style proxy due to the costs and draconian firewalls involved in the C2K network. Plus C2K’s partners in this, SX3 (now Northgate) were charging hundreds of pounds for callout to look at the problem. It’s one thing being expensive when you’re offering a boutique service but C2K are administering a network of PCs which are locked down tighter than a wallet from Ballymena. How can they be more expensive????
C2K’s policies in this regard, as well as the fear, uncertainty and doubt that they espoused was one of the reasons that my company stopped working with Education markets. We’d respond if called but the amount of time and effort spent in building a relationship, hammering down a set of requirements only to have it cancelled at the last minute and given out to a box shifter just killed our enthusiasm for it. I really used to care about the state of education technology in Northern Ireland as a whole. Now I’m concentrating on making sure my kids are okay.