Microsoft Monopoly, Schools, and Family Feuds.

My twin daughters are first year high school this year, they are taking a business course which teaches basics of internet, word processing, spreadsheet and so on. A pretty good course, well designed and taught. The problem is that it only uses (and assumes the kids have at home) Microsoft operating system, and Microsoft office, as there is always some stuff to be finished at home, mailed back and forth to work on it some more at school next day.

The Microsoft-centric approach of the course is a problem at our home, because I was banning installing Microsoft products at any home computer. The girls have learned (ok, forced to learn) to work in OpenOffice, but over certain complexity of the document, saving stuff in OpenOffice as doc and opening it in school next day in MS-word only brings sweat and tears. It is simply impossible, after several evenings of shouts "I hate this Linux thing" I broke down and installed an old version of Windows at home. Of course it is too old, and cannot open the new formats they work in school with, so the girls outsmarted me, and simply stay longer at school to finish their projects there in the cozy Microsoft-only environment. Family friendly.

What is interesting in all this, is the Ontario School System purchased Sun's StarOffice with province-wide license. But no one is using it, and no one at all is teaching using it. So that is an interesting conundrum, why did Ontario spent my and other's tax-dollars for it? The problem is likely the generic herd behaviour, if the teachers were teaching it using non-Microsoft products, I can hear the parents shouting "why do you teach something my kids will not be able to use at future work" etc.

So all this contributes to the fact that weaning off the Microsoft stuff will take much longer than I thought. But it will happen. I will take either a generation (start counting in 1990, so by 2015 we should be there :) ), or (more likely) a paradigm shift, invalidation of this "computer = office suite + IE" view.