Here is a great experiment you can do. Use an app like for example Netbalancer that can show you bandwidth use per app.
Launch your locally installed PowerPoint. Note I am not talking about Office 365 but a locally installed Office component. Start some internal presentation to your fellow workers, just presenting, no editing or creating a new presentation. Amaze yourself at it sends data to Microsoft at the rate of 4 to 5 MB/s. Yeah...just try it.
> Amaze yourself at it sends data to Microsoft at the rate of 4 to 5 MB/s. Yeah...just try it.
Amazing is too small a term. Unacceptable is more like it. Wow. Why do companies that spend a significant amount of money on securing their infrastructure fall for this?
Highschools demand students buy a Windows laptop, preferably some overpriced piece of crap with a few applications pre-installed from their 'preferred partner' who also happens to be a Microsoft representative.
It's way beyond despicable but I'm too tired to fight it so I've caved in and bought a Windows laptop for one of my kids to use for highschool. It disgusts me that Microsoft manages to extract a tax on every kid in highschool and that schools allow themselves to be used as a part of the marketing and sales arm of a multinational company.
Tweakers podcast of last week I think (in Dutch so I might as well paraphrase it translated). The topic was chromebooks and how it's convenient and easy for a lot of schools
> I went to buy a laptop for my son's new school last week. When I heard it was required, I was expecting some list of hardware requirements but no, the list I got had exactly one specification: Windows.
Schools also do free advertising for Microsoft products, at least in all of the schools where I went to until ~5 years ago. At minimum once a year we were made aware of the fact that we could get Microsoft products like Office at steep discounts from their new online store which they were so proud of and thankful for. Benevolent microsoft letting us get used to their ecosystem for prices we could actually afford, but not free! Still gotta make that profit!
Not sure why they didn't also advertise for libreoffice which, last I checked, is even cheaper and an even better protip (better compatibility if we would just not force each other to keep using the proprietary thing). I guess they just didn't feel like the libreoffice foundation was giving them free money the way that microsoft pretends to.
It gets even more ironic if you realize that schools fall in the 'semi-government' category and thus it's legally required (not optional) to use open source software unless that's impossible, and if it's impossible then it needs to be documented why it's impossible. In practice, you can guess how much this law is followed. I never heard of any consequences for not following it.
TL;DR: legally, there is the opposite of a microsoft requirement, except many schools require both Windows and Office in practice
What exactly were they supposed to teach you in 90s and 00s? I was a rebellious Linux-loving computer geek kid during these times, but OpenOffice was incomparably worse back then (and other programming environments weren't as accessible as VB6) - so I maintained a Windows VM for school, not because I had to (fuck that) but because the software was so much better.
If someone has an aptitude for computers and want to work with them then:
1) productivity suites are a poor fit generaly.
2) learning concepts over specific tools is always going to be a better investment.
3) I’m not sure there even was open office when I was learning. But there was lotus and co. // I’m mainly annoyed that they didn’t teach concepts around computers and instead focused on “Microsoft X” so my entire education was based on one company and what it was inflicting on the world.
Everyone who graduates only knowing those tools is enormous pressure for companies to use those tools, or the burden of training from scratch is on the company.
Yeah, I remember Lotus... And you seriously would've rather used that??? I prefer to keep torture out of schools.
It was the other way around, at least where I live. Companies pressured schools to teach skills they actually need people to have - and that's MS Office, because even today nothing else comes close.
And children with aptitude for computers, who don't need office suites but would like programming - that's less than 1%. If you want public schools, you're not going to have specialized teaching for small groups - nobody pays more for that.
I’d prefer a real education about how computers work, not to learn any particular single tool or ecosystem.
Religious education does not only teach Christianity. It’s wild that computer education only teaches (or taught) Microsoft (a non-European proprietary corporation).
> even today nothing else comes close.
Close to what though?
Close to replicating MS office? Sure, but that’s like judging an apartment building on the merits of a house.
Your implication that productivity tools compared to MS office are lacking. That’s extremely dubious, perhaps some features are lacking (google sheets doesn’t support GANT charts for example) but there’s other things that you can do which are impossible in office (google sheets can do raw SQL and attach to big query); I’m specifically comparing google to MS here but it’s mainly to give an idea that things don’t map 1:1 across productivity suites.
And yes: The world runs on excel, but I find it hard to believe that’s because excel is the pinnacle of software. It’s probably more to do with that it’s “good enough” and fairly flexible- and crucially, everyone knows it and it’s pitfalls.
Excel can do SQL as well, and it actually has abstracted data connectors capable of much more than just SQL and you can easily provide your own connectors too, and much more than just connectors - Excel is used e.g. as a full-fledged trading station at some places. It's capabilities like these why Excel runs the world, it's not some accident of history. You don't need to do stuff like this all the time, but it makes no sense to use two office suites, so you use the more capable one.
I went to school in the '00s. After irreversibly breaking the Office installation on my home computer while tinkering, I ended up doing all of my IT coursework, which was required to be done with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, using OpenOffice instead. For production use, the differences between the office suites may have been significant, but for schoolwork, it was more than good enough. We were to take screenshots of the application windows while we produced our work, and the assessors were happy enough with my OpenOffice screenshots.
