BECTA has announced an extension to its Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft. According to BECTA, ‘schools who decide to purchase Microsoft software were likely to spend 20-37 per cent less than might have been expected in the absence of the MoU’.
This may be good for schools and is certainly good for Microsoft, but behind the nice words relations between Microsoft and BECTA are strained. What won’t have thrilled Microsoft was BECTA’s new interim report published this month that looks at whether schools should upgrade to the Vista operating system and Windows 2007.
The research, carried out by Oakleigh Consultants, recommended that schools not bother upgrading to Vista until at least 2008 because it has ‘no must have features’. Office 2007 did little better with BECTA identifying 170 new features relevant only for business, and that implementation costs ‘would be significant’.
As with Vista, ‘none of the features were a must have’. The other problem was the lack of support for Microsoft’s new file formats in other products (particularly StarOffice) and Microsoft’s lack of support for the Open Document Standard (ODF) format.
BETT gave Microsoft some respite with the launch of Grava, code name for a new set of tools to help developers assemble rich content for the education market. What does this mean in the real world? It looks like another attempt to help developers take existing static content and translate it into something more interesting (and profitable). Microsoft’s angle is that Grava is simple and less expensive. Hardly news as there are already loads of tools that do exactly the same thing. Even if Grava isn’t groundbreaking, Microsoft products are at least normally robust and simple to use and integrate together, a good approach to recruiting content developers who don’t have leading specialist technical skills. Whether this translates into better content is debatable - given the fragility of the UK software market we suspect not.
Microsoft is also working on Grava with the Educational Testing Centre (ETS) to develop a new ‘offering to help parents and educators better understand how a child approaches learning’. Hoping they can make a contribution to what has always been a complex and emotional topic must have made sense to someone at Microsoft. This won’t address BECTA’s demand for better interoperability with open source software or boost sales of Vista and Office 2007 in the UK education market.
Microsoft and BECTA’s fractious relationship is almost inevitable given their entirely different philosophies, but ultimately it will be the schools and Local Authorities who spend IT budgets who will decide whether or not Microsoft’s products get purchased and used.
