Educational (School) computer costs

The world’s leading educational newspaper”, TES (Times Educational Supplement) has just reported that the U.K. government has found that

“Primary schools could cut their computer costs by nearly half if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from the world’s largest software company…”

The article mentions that England’s school computer system was studied by the British Educational Communications and Technology Association, the Government’s ICT (Information and Communications Technology) agency.

Microsoft is getting the shaft lately on numerous fronts:
The ease in which spyware is installed on your Windows computer without your knowledge.
The constant stream of critical security problems with Windows itself.
Upward spiraling software costs.
The software licensing system (that makes you re-purchase the software every three years.)

Whether you believe Microsoft deserves it’s current state of affairs or not doesn’t matter in this case, it happens to be occuring more and more recently. And England deciding that it’s school systems don’t need the trouble of dealing with Microsoft software on their computers is just the latest indication of Microsoft’s troubles.

My opinion? It’s about time. But I work in the industry, so I may be prejudiced just a tad.

If you are computer networking schools or setting up any type of a computer school desk, you should look at other software products before you attempt to settle on Microsoft’s offerings.