[michaelt]

> I reckon it’s all to do with support. If something breaks they can just pick up the phone and tell them to sort it out.

You must have a very different experience with getting support for proprietary software than I do.

You can spend four- and five-figures per seat per year on CAD software, and still only get canned responses suggesting you uninstall and reinstall. You can license Google Docs for 2000 employees, doesn't mean you can get a single easily reproducible bug fixed.

[dfxm12]

If you don't buy support for software, you're the support team.

Maybe that's something a savvy teacher is willing to take on for a small, advanced class where the students largely know what they're doing, or at least have a reasonable baseline of prior education.

It certainly doesn't scale when we're talking school wide software, tiny IT teams and dozens of thousands of students & and hundreds of faculty of varying levels of computer literacy all bringing their own devices.

I guess it depends on if you have a strong enough IT team to provide that support or not. I doubt many schools, or even large corporations do.

[murgindrag]

The #1 platform in schools is Google.

Google doesn't provide support either.

Or to be specific, there is a support email with obnoxious, egoistic minimum wage drones who make Comcast look great. There are all sorts of broken self-serve automated systems too. Empowered employees capable of understanding what they're talking about? They do their best to shield them from customers.

Google stuff mostly works. When it doesn't, you're mostly SOL. It's like that even if you pay for the fancy enterprise stuff.

Microsoft has support. They're also nowhere close to being the #1 platform in schools. Apple has support. Ditto.