April 2007

Lots of coverage of of a large US software company and their $3 software offer. One angle from the BBC Microsoft aims to double PC base and a slightly more cynical view from The Register Microsoft debuts Windows for the Poor. I'll leave you to pick your preference but I will elaborate on a post I made to one of those sites.

I do a bit of work amongst low decile education institutes here in NZ in the technology adaptation area, mainly kindergartens and childcare centres. During the training sessions they would rant a bit about how the NZ govt. deal with Microsoft didn't cover Early Childhood Education and how unfair it was as they had to fork out around $300 to get an academic use copy.

SilverStripe, the company that developed the open source SilverStripe Customer Management System, has been given $50,000 from Google to mentor ten students. The software projects the students will be working on are aimed at making web sites easier to create and maintain. The projects will become part of the standard distribution of the SilverStripe CMS distribution.

I put this type of headline on a par with the Firefox shell commands one of a few years ago. It might sell more copy and one could argue that it is even accurate however the root cause is *still* a Windows specific problem, and no amount of polish is going to make that one shine. Computerworld article is here.

Having said all that, we need to be reminded that Firefox on Linux has had challenges as well but at least the comments in the last paragraph still hold true.