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May 30, 2007

software

MS Office in New Zealand schools: and the battle rages on

Posted May. 30, ’07, 10:30 AM PT by Kate Marshall
Category | Software

applekto12.jpgThe issue of removing MS Office from school computers has reared its shrill, ugly head yet again in New Zealand.

Back in April, I reported that some New Zealand educators were upset about having to remove MS Office from their classroom Macs, thanks to new vendor contracts. Now, one Auckland principal, Julien Le Sueur, is definitely not happy with the situation, or with suggestions of alternative software like NeoOffice or Apple’s offerings:

Mr Le Sueur said NeoOffice was littered with problems, and its website warned that users could expect lots of bugs. “That’s not the sort of software we should be expecting kids in New Zealand to be using.“

Orders to remove the software stemmed from Microsoft insisting that New Zealand’s Ministry of Education pay licensing fees for all school-owned Macs to use MS Office, even though only half the computers used the software suite, according to Education Minister Steve Mahary. This reportedly resulted in an extra $2.7 million NZ dollars ($1.9 USD) that the ministry couldn’t justify giving to Microsoft. Schools can still buy MS Office for Mac on their own at a discounted rate. In the end though, it seems that all this back-and-forth over education budgets and software licenses could hurt students whose only exposure to a pervasive software suite may have been the classroom computer.

[Via MacSurfer]

[Edited 7:05 PM EST for links]


4 Comments

Fletcher said:

Microsoft plays this game with a lot of their software licenses. They will license their server-side technologies per-client and require that you buy a license for every client in your network whether you expect them to use the technology or not. Microsoft software licenses can cost a lot of money. This is why even as expensive as Mac OS X Server and XServes are they can save a lot over similar offering from Microsoft. Bill Gates is not the richest man alive for nothing.

May 30, 2007 11:03 AM
John said:

Well I have to agree that paying for software you are not using is a waste of money. At 2.7 million that is a lot of waste and a lot of money to be paying for when you don't even have the software installed! The alternatives do work and I think they should try them before having a cow about it. They could use the money they save into buying newer Macs.

May 30, 2007 11:22 AM
spiderbat said:

There's a single thing more frustrating than paying for micro$oft sw and not using it: it's paying for m$ sw and using it!

May 30, 2007 3:50 PM
Dave-O said:

That whole "exposure to a pervasive software suite" argument makes me queasy. We should not be teaching kids how to use advanced Word features. We should be giving them the skills to learn how to use future versions of Office. Didn't Microsoft finally execute Clippy? That means the most important lesson I learned from using Office in college (step 1: kill Clippy) is no longer valid.

June 1, 2007 8:55 AM

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