Microsoft DreamSpark: Free Dev licenses for students
dreamspark.com
dreamspark.com
What is interesting is that over the year I've begun to repeatedly see signs of that Microsoft is no more. This is just another one of those.
While I've been passively against Microsoft ever since 80's I've always considered them a credible opposing force to other stacks of software, such as FOSS or GNU, or Unix, or Macs. Eventhough I wasn't a Windows user I always knew what was new on the MS front, and what new features they would soon be selling.
However, these days I hardly bother to raise my eyebrow anytime Microsoft announces something. I think it started with, or at around the time of, the anticipation of Vista.
Vista was a bit everything and then quite much nothing: it didn't feel like a success and, indeed, now it seems that it never became a success either. This is not only because XP was deemed "good enough" but, to me, because Microsoft really hadn't figured out anything relevant to add to XP. They would have implemented it in Vista but it seems that since XP a Windows-like operating system had already reached a saturation point, both feature-wise and UI-wise. This means they must have stopped thinking about -- or run out of -- any juicy practical improvements in around 2000 or so: they still had something to be implemented in XP but then nothing much. People could run XP for a decade and they wouldn't miss anything important as long as they could install new versions of their browser.
Unlike Vista, Windows 7 will probably break the XP dam and flood over to everywhere around the world. However, this doesn't mean there's much substance to it except the sheer brute force ramming the foundations of the 8-or-9-year-old XP. It will take a few years to change (merely the name of) the de facto Windows operating system but as XP will begin to suffer from fundamental aging problems such as lack of drivers the transition will punch through. However, unless Windows 7 is a total blunder there will be absolutely nothing from Microsoft that would replace it for the following ten years or even longer. Microsoft has had a hard time with XP already and they now have one chance to do one more force-update and then they're stuck. I don't think it would be unimaginable for Windows 7 to be the last major operating system from Microsoft.
Similarly with IE: IE8 is better in many ways and delivers features that people have been waiting for since IE6. However, I didn't see people rejoicing together, queueing at stores, or slashdotting Microsoft's download site. IE8 is not a key player in the web browser market: it's just catching up. There's no disruptive energy behind IE8; people who have been fed up with IE6/IE7 have been using Firefox for years. IE8 doesn't make the difference anymore. IE7 and IE8 could just as well have been IE6.1 and IE6.2.
Now, the student licenses! Even no more than five years ago I would have got a grumpy face from thinking about the horde of freshmen that would get Microsoft stuff for free and learn to think of the world of computing as equal to MS Windows, MS Visual Studio, MS languages, and MS tools. Now I'm not worried at all, for some reason. I don't feel their student licenses changing anything in the world even if they offered them for negative price. The smart guys have been using Linux/BSD or OS X for years already, and everything important is cross-platform or on the web these days so that there's no single Microsoft solution that would be the de facto environment for most tasks. Perhaps I just exclusively know and read people who I consider smart and are in the non-MS camp, or I'm missing some other reality check here, but I'm not worrying about this DreamSpark thing. It will take off because Microsoft is huge and a like a tanker it takes miles to come to a full stop. But as for the bleeding edge where new things are tried, Microsoft isn't and won't be a major player. Rather, the DreamSpark thing feels like a one last stretch to level the playing field to their favor, and those kind of stunts are bound to fail per definition.
To exaggerate, Microsoft is effectively in the position as if they hadn't done or released anything after Windows XP. Not good. (For them, I mean. :))
If Windows 7 is the last major operating system, then what will replace it?
Mac OS X? Apple's cheapest desktop computer is £499 excluding monitor. Good luck selling them to the business users who traditionally buy Dells at half the price, especially as most are using Office and Exchange Server, plus all the custom software in their niche which is written for Windows.
Linux distributions? They're getting better, but the community is still incredibly fractured and the infrastructure with commercial software is still far from ideal. Dropping Adobe's products or Office for their open-source equivalents just isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. Perhaps when Wine reaches parity with Windows (and I can see that time coming), but even if that particular hurdle is overcome, from a usability perspective it's going to take a big effort for GNOME to reach parity with Windows, let alone manage to make enough commercial impact to overcome the familiarity that the average Windows user has. Hell, even in terms of system administration, managing a set of Windows machines is supposed to be much easier than a set of Linux machines. Perhaps the difference is we're going to have a time where people choose Windows instead of having Windows as the only choice, and that's a positive step forward.
Oh, and while Microsoft would rather have people paying for Vista licenses, XP licenses still means money in their pocket as well. We're still at a time when they're primarily competing with themselves. If people use Windows 7 for a decade, they're still getting the license fees on basically every PC unit sold.
Students should try to expose themselves to as many possible technologies as possible. Open source, Microsoft, Apple, etc. These sorts of programs help students do that.
Just my personal opinion but I think schools, universities should be promoting open source, rather than backing commercial products.
You get locked in because after 2-3 years of churning out work you have both comfort with one technology, and a base of libraries and routines that took you 2-3 years to write, and know.
Once your down that rabbit hole, switching becomes much harder as you have to abandon the mind share you created in the languages you used. And in the case of .NET since so much of what you do there is unique to MS alone, and mostly due to the "LOCK IN" to their OS, walking away from it is not FREE or EASY.
Worse yet stay with it long enough and watch your world crumble to nothing when MS seeking revenue enhancement decides it needs to release the next great language, and obsolete years of your work, with an upgrade. Don't think so? Ask the VB 6.0 crowd and the thousands of COM component vendors whose industry disappeared overnight when MS pulled the plug on them and forced .NET as the standard.
I don't agree that students should expose themselves to as many technologies as possible, if among their choices one technology could cause them harm...
Not condoning Microsoft or anything, but perhaps someone needs it. :)
I really don't get why people are afraid of "condoning" Microsoft. They're one choice in a sea of thousands; to each his own. That mentality really bothers me.
What does bother me is kneejerk reactions to being against Microsoft for no good reason. So I use Mac OS X mainly, and *bsd or Linux for servers, and I contribute to an open source project. I still find a use for Server 2008 and Windows Mobile and more..