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Evil Incarnate (12/22/97)
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Believe it or not, we at AtAT try to be charitable during the holidays. (Stop laughing.) But everytime Microsoft starts trying to persuade the K-12 education market to replace their Macs with Windows 95 systems, we have to say there's little we find more immoral.
Consider, for instance, this Microsoft page expressly written to lure grade schools and high schools to ditch their Macs and replace them with Windows 95 machines. This page is packed with half-truths, judgment calls, and outright deception all meant to get schools to spend their money on new computer systems. (Selling Windows 95 as better than Macintosh by touting its Plug-and-Play feature is like selling a Yugo as better than a Saturn because a Yugo occasionally starts.)
Now why do we find this so hateful? Because, as we've mentioned in the past, the administrators who make the decisions to buy a school's computers are not the people who have to use and support those machines. The kids suffer by using systems that work less often and make them focus on the tool instead of the task at hand (namely, to learn). The teachers suffer because they're expected to be system administrators on top of being teachers, and they often lack any kind of training in the field-- Macs are easy enough to manage even for an overworked and undertrained fifth-grade teacher, but stick that teacher in a lab full of broken Windows 95 machines, and everyone's got a problem. Microsoft's only in it for the money. Period. Because if they cared about the kids in the schools, they'd tell them to keep their Macs-- or they'd ship an OS that actually works.
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SceneLink (294)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 12/22/97 episode: December 22, 1997: (Sorry—this was before we started writing intro text for each episode!)
Other scenes from that episode: 292: Yellow Box Just Works (12/22/97) Even though Rhapsody's still in its first developer release, it's creating a bit of a stir with its cross-platform development capabilities. One of the most intriguing features of the Rhapsody development environment is its reported ability to recompile a single application codebase for deployment on other non-Rhapsody platforms... 293: Jobs: What to Say? (12/22/97) With no real new products to roll out in three weeks (the NC's are no longer expected to make an appearance, by most accounts), what exactly will Steve Jobs talk about in his MacWorld Expo keynote address?...
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