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Microsoft loosens Apple's hold on schools | |
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| Time: 09:48 EST/14:48 GMT | News Source: The Kansas City Star | Posted By: Todd Richardson | ||
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Apple Computer, formerly the undisputed leader in sales of personal computers to schools, has steadily lost ground over the years to lower-priced PCs that run Microsoft Windows software. And these days the company faces another threat in the education market: a proposed class-action legal settlement by Microsoft that could result in the donation of hundreds of millions of dollars of Microsoft software to needy schools throughout California. | ||
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| #1 By 2332 (65.221.182.3) at 2/17/2003 11:47:53 AM |
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It wasn't really dumb, actually.
Up until just recently, it was *far* cheaper to run an all-Mac network at a school than either a mix network or a Windows-based network. This was because Apple gave extremely large discounts to education institutions, as well as perks like free support. Microsoft has just started to do the same on a large scale, thereby removing the one advantage Apple had. |
| #2 By 415 (199.8.71.121) at 2/17/2003 12:41:26 PM |
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That's not 100% true, RMD. Microsoft's volume licensing for education has been providing dirt cheap pricing for AT LEAST 4 years. And that's only taking into account the software costs. As Intel hardware have always been cheaper.
4 years is how long I've worked as a systems manager for a private university, so I know my shiznit yo... We migrated to Windows because the Vax mainframe was no longer viable, and there was no student information system that could run on Macs, or even via Terminal Services (at the time). Not to mention all the engineering and business software that existed for Windows, that did not exist for Macs. It was a no-brainer... |
| #3 By 6859 (206.156.242.36) at 2/17/2003 1:00:18 PM |
| It always seemed to me to be silly for the schools (which were all under a budget crunch) to be spending all that extra $$$ on Apple when the same on a generic Intel box with Windows on it would have served them far better. |
| #4 By 3653 (63.162.177.140) at 2/17/2003 1:23:26 PM |
| jaggedflame, you might want to talk to Claris about that. |
| #5 By 2332 (65.221.182.3) at 2/17/2003 2:20:56 PM |
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#3 - "Microsoft's volume licensing for education has been providing dirt cheap pricing for AT LEAST 4 years."
Well, Apple has been almost giving away their stuff to schools for 10+ years. The first time I ever saw a Microsoft setup then ended up being cheaper than a more or less equivalent Apple setup was in 2000. Since many schools already had an Apple infrastructure, Microsoft's competitive pricing wasn't competitive enough since it would take an even greater discount to counter the cost of switching the entire infrastructure of many of these schools. |
| #6 By 6859 (206.156.242.36) at 2/17/2003 2:47:04 PM |
| Using tems like "ideal" to refer to a computing platform (software and hardware combined) is too close to the drones' cry of "get a real computer." |
| #7 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 2/17/2003 2:47:43 PM |
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The best products are always the most popular ones. That's how a free market works.
Oh, and actually School IS a job training center. However, there is some balance between specific skills and more fundamental skills and how they should be taught. I think it's important to teach students how to think, and how to think "outside the box" per se. That last is actually my fundamental reason for not wanting Apple or Unix in schools, as the proponents of those systems only want it in place to indoctrinate students with a particular system, so that they will encourage it's adoption in the business world. That's no basis for implementing computers in the classroom. This post was edited by sodablue on Monday, February 17, 2003 at 15:35. |
| #8 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 2/17/2003 3:40:13 PM |
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JWM - "Soda, so does that mean the highest grossing movies are the best ones?"
Yes, actually it does mean that. "I think Windows is the most popular because everyone wants to compatible with everyone else." Let's rephrase your statement. Windows is the most popular because it is the best solution to the problem of maintaining interoperability with other computer users. "I remember telling a woman about Apple when she was looking to get a new computer and she said she wanted to make sure her system was compatible with the software she used at work." Exactly! That's how the free market works! |
| #9 By 116 (129.116.86.41) at 2/17/2003 4:07:22 PM |
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Hmmm... Dell has eviscerated Apple on price and always has been since I was in high school close to 10 years ago.
The argument for Apple has been relegated to only the graphics and journalism labs where they account for a large percentage of the computers used in the work market. It make sense for those types of people to have macs, although even now that market is changing for people with PC's. Its surprising to me how long Apple has stuck around with more expensive and technically inferior products... I guess packaging means a lot to people! Peace, RA |
| #10 By 8883 (64.253.108.243) at 2/17/2003 4:34:26 PM |
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bob670, take off your tinfoil hat for a minute and please tell me who's made a better office suite than MS Office over the past decade.
This should be good... |
| #11 By 2459 (24.170.151.19) at 2/17/2003 5:02:38 PM |
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bob670, you overlook that MS did not have a monopoly on OSes or office suites at the time MS Office was introduced. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were the market leaders and de facto standards at the time. They also had closed file formats. If MS was able to achieve compatability with these and other software products despite their closed file formats, why is it such a big deal that MS' formats are closed? Besides, MS' word format has been available and unchanged for a while. Blame lazy/inept software developers for the lack of compatability.
Bob Smith posted similar statements as these a few days ago. This isn't FUD. This is how things were. BTW, your lack of compatability issues are largely due to Apple's support of MS/*n*x technologies in OS X along with the availability of MS Office on the Mac. Apple's interop story was not always this good. There is also still the issues of software availability, platform extensibility, and price/performance that still make the Mac an unsuitable choice for many people. There are also software and hardware issues much like, if not worse than those found on Windows PCs. Check the Mac forums sometimes. Also, if Apple continues on it's current path, it will become the type of anti-competitive company you and others claim MS to be. I'd say that they've been on that path ever since Job's return, but moreso in the past couple of years. Some food for thought: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/03/BU197497.DTL What are you and others going to say after Office 11's release, if MS' competition still cannot achieve full compatability despite the availability of XML file formats for Office? |
| #12 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 2/17/2003 5:16:57 PM |
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bob670 - "Anyone (soda) who would use the term free market and then refer to Microsoft is proof positivie that MS plants people in forums."
Well there goes your credibility. JWM - "Soda - Using your logic, does that mean you think President Bush is the "best" president? " He didn't receive the most votes now, did he? *wink* Look, you have to understand that the word "best" is subjective, and can only be defined by the particular consumer. When I say the best selling product is best in the free market, I use the definition of best which applies to the general consumer. So while a Honda Civic outsells a Mercedes E320 that makes the Civic the best car to solve the general problem of simple transportation. That does not mean the E320 is not the best car if you want luxury transportation. It's all in the perspective. That's why on C&D's top ten list you'll see the E320 because they don't care about price, but on Consumer Reports list you'll see the Honda. Anyway, I'm just needling and making a point. It was a lesson I learned years ago, and I make it a point to put everyone else through the same pain. |
| #13 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 2/17/2003 5:17:48 PM |
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n4cer - "What are you and others going to say after Office 11's release, if MS' competition still cannot achieve full compatability despite the availability of XML file formats for Office? "
I'll give you a hint... It involves lot's of whining. :) |
| #14 By 12071 (203.185.215.144) at 2/17/2003 6:02:31 PM |
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#21 "What are you and others going to say after Office 11's release, if MS' competition still cannot achieve full compatability despite the availability of XML file formats for Office?"
Who's to say that the XML file format will be any more open than what is currently used? Do you happen to know what the XML format is going to be? It is very easy to put BLOB's into XML - it doesn't make it any more open. I'm not saying this is what MS will do, I have no idea what they will do, but what makes you sure they will not? |
| #15 By 7390 (63.211.44.114) at 2/17/2003 8:34:05 PM |
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What are you and others going to say after Office 11's release, if MS' competition still cannot achieve full compatability despite the availability of XML file formats for Office?
The current word document format has been reversed engineered and the schema has been on the web for years. But yet no one can reproduce everything exactly. I don't think that knowing about the format is the issue. The issue is what to do with that format. How to render that file is the issue and clearly MS is the best at it. So big deal Office 11 will be in XML, how to display the file is the important thing and I don't think that MS will or should give that away. |
| #16 By 2459 (24.170.151.19) at 2/17/2003 9:46:07 PM |
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http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/office11_beta1.asp
Office 11 documents that are stored in XML format can be round-tripped, which means that they can be edited outside of Office and then returned to, say, Word and edited again without losing any content. Furthermore, Office 11 XML documents are 100 percent compatible with the entire Office feature set: If you can do it with a native Office document, you can do it with XML. And finally, it's possible to use the same document in different Office applications to get new types of views on the same data. For example, you might display a list of information in a Word chart, and then view that same data as an interactive chart in Excel. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnofftalk/html/office12092002.asp "Word 11" supports XML file creation, storage, editing, and XSL data transformation. In Microsoft Word 2000 and 2002, documents saved in HTML format had some islands of XML data saved within them, but you could not use these products to natively create or save XML documents. In "Word 11," you can save documents into several different XML document formats, including full-fidelity round-trippable Word documents conforming to the Microsoft Word XML document schema or other customer-defined XML schemas. You can even apply XSL transforms to XML data during save operations. http://www.microsoft.com/office/developer/preview/downloads/office11andxml.doc Native XML support in “Word 11” enables authoring of rich content with customer-defined XML schemas, enabling the repurposing of document content across devices, platforms and processes. In addition, “Word 11” can act as a smart client and a host for Smart Document solutions. “Word 11” offers two ways to save documents as XML. Support for XML as a native file format preserves the Word document, including formatting, hyperlinks and paragraphs. Support for customer-defined XML schemas enables users to preserve or extract from the document only the data or structural elements of interest to a particular application. In either case, users can create documents containing information marked by XML tags in a completely intuitive fashion; users need not learn or understand the concepts behind XML to realize the full benefit. http://www.microsoft.com/office/developer/preview/default.asp "Word 11," the code name for the next version of Microsoft Word, includes support for XML as a native file format. This enables users to work with and save documents in XML. Word 11 templates can also include underlying XML schemas, enabling users to create documents containing XML markup and tagged information without needing to learn or understand XML. Developers can create Word 11 templates from custom XML schemas and build intelligent applications around these documents. Rich XML programmability in Office 11, including support for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and XPath, allows developers to build solutions that capture and reuse document content across applications, processes, devices, and platforms. XML support enables Word 11 to function as a smart client for XML Web services and a host for smart document solutions. Another link: http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/11/15/021118plmsxml_1.html ----------------------- More info is available at the links provided. Other than that, you can sign up for the Office CPP program and get Office Beta 2 when it's available. http://microsoft.order-5.com/officeeval/ |
| #17 By 3653 (216.153.67.116) at 2/17/2003 10:11:08 PM |
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back to the topic of macintosh...
When I took my current position 2 years ago... my company had 22 macs in use. Today, we have 3. I take all the credit. Of course, OS X made my job easy. ;-) |
| #18 By 2459 (24.170.151.19) at 2/17/2003 10:27:26 PM |
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JWM
For converting current *.doc files over, you'd need Office 11, unless the competition or some Office 97/2000 middleware vendor provides that functionality, or you save to a different format using your current version of Word. But this would be no different than the situation you face if you currently wanted to move to, for example, Open Office. For new document creation/compatibility, you just need an application that can produce XML with XSD schemas. If you meant that Word is the only Office app to support XML, this is not the case. I just gave snippets that talked about Word primarily. The links show that all the Office apps, except Outlook, support XML. This post was edited by n4cer on Monday, February 17, 2003 at 22:27. |
| #19 By 2459 (24.170.151.19) at 2/17/2003 11:32:31 PM |
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They're usually not created based on another company's proprietary format. The way it has been in the past is the new company supported import/export of the competitor's format, but also provided other formats including standard formats and their own proprietary format.
Again, MS didn't have any handouts when going up against WordPerfect and Lotus (and others). They reverse-engineered the formats to achieve compatibility, and also offered their own formats. As their apps became more popular, so did their formats. If a company you do business with uses Office 11, it would be to their advantage to save public documents as XML so not only can they share with their partners, they can also use the data from that document for other things. Take the same data used in a spreadsheet and transform it for display on the web, etc. It'd be no harder for them to do this than it is to save to PDF like many companies do now. Also, since XML is being pushed as a data exchange format, it makes sense for them to do this. If they don't, that's their choice, but you could still use a Word viewer to see the document in it's original format. The Word *.doc format has been available for a while (unchanged since 1997). The problem other app venders have with it is much like the problem with web browsers -- the same document can be rendered differently in different apps. Again, I say, why can't the competition do what MS did in the past? The only advice I can give is to push your partners to distribute their documents in XML. Even after the release of Office 11, it'll be a while before you see XML Office documents because this also depends on the adoption rate of the next Office. |
| #20 By 2960 (156.80.64.132) at 2/18/2003 9:14:02 AM |
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#1,
They are not necessarily being taught 'computers'. The computers are being used as tools for other forms of education. It's not a 'computer' class. TL |
| #21 By 2960 (156.80.64.132) at 2/18/2003 9:16:04 AM |
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Microsoft should not be allowed to benifit from it's punishment. That is ludicrous.
If they want to help education in serving their sentence, fine. Then they can donate an equal amount of CASH to the education system and then the education system can decide where to spend that money. This is nothing short of allowing Microsoft to buy themselves into a market by product dumping, which is normally illegal. If allowed to do this, they would be allowed to do something legally that would normally be illegal. TL |
| #22 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 2/18/2003 11:16:25 AM |
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TechLarry - "Microsoft should not be allowed to benifit from it's punishment. That is ludicrous. "
Yet it's quite common in all lawsuits of this nature. When Chevy settled over the trucks that blew up, they did so by giving all previous owners $500 rebate coupons good towards new trucks. |
| #23 By 3653 (63.162.177.140) at 2/18/2003 12:01:28 PM |
| but Sodablue, we need a new set of rules against Microsoft. Past cases aren't relevent against a perpetrator as big as evil Microsoft. I personally think anything less than burning all their employees alive... is a travesty. |
| #24 By 7390 (63.211.44.114) at 2/18/2003 2:35:51 PM |
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lol, #38 By mooresa56
I was thinking the same thing about the Java people at Sun or anyone that chooses to work on an Apple instead Wintel. |
| #25 By 3653 (63.162.177.140) at 2/18/2003 5:15:30 PM |
| but RedHook, if you kill all the Sun people... who will feed the lawyers? |
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