In the news this week, British schools have taken a clear stand against Microsoft’s new invasive software models, advising educators not to upgrade to Microsoft Vista or the newest Microsoft Office, Office 2007. The announcement came down this week from the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency.

The reason the UK agency doesn’t want its educators to upgrade are prohibitive cost and issues with interoperability (how the software works with your hardware and other software). The issues that arise when trying to use Vista and Office with other software, and even with older version of the same software, are the chief concern of the agency.

They are worried that the difficulties might create a divide between the students, setting those who can afford to upgrade at home some how “above” the students who can not afford an upgrade. they feel that barring the upgrade from schools will help keep education equal for everyone, and I think they are right in this assumption.

I also think that by avoiding the upgrade they eliminate the cost of technical issues arising in the school as their IT departments would have to to commit serious time and resources to hardware and software issues. Even the document format supported by Microsoft is proprietary instead of standard inclusive, as they support only their own format, OOXML, and not the international Open Document standard ODF.

Microsoft has been shooting itself in the foot one application at a time over the years, and the world is finally realizing it. The Netherlands recently rejected Microsoft Office altogether by going to Open Source solutions instead. Internet Explorer has not worked well with the rest of the Internet in years, and free browsers FireFox and Safari having increasing market share demonstrates that better than I ever could explain. I support the UK decision and think it is in the best interests of the students.

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