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by npteljes 1486 days ago
That's the point everyone should consider in the Windows/Linux debate. Windows/Office is not the de facto standard because they are superior technology - they won because Microsoft produced good enough software, employed every business trick in the book while also pioneering some, and because they covered the bases OP pointed out. Service and user experience is not only a very important part to provide, but often the part that makes or breaks the product.

That said, what schools teach is just some legislation away. I believe regulation could make it happen even now, if the regulators wanted so. But, of course, regulators are people too and therefore, yet again, it's not up to the technology itself to be better.
3 comments
ed25519FUUU 1486 days ago
I think you’re missing OPs main point that any money saved from switching to open source would be eaten away and reversed dramatically with support costs.

Can you get unlimited remote support and a weekly on-site tech for $10k a year? No way.

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npteljes 1486 days ago
I'm not missing that at all, I'm saying two things, that for one, Microsoft does this support thing well enough and two, legislation doesn't have to take the easier way, if they'd say that schools must teach X, the market would figure it out somehow. It would probably even be a worse experience as it is currently, but that never stopped any legislator.
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scarface74 1486 days ago
Yes, just like the “market” figured out how to increase privacy after the GDPR and not just a shit ton of cookie pop ups.
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bobthepanda 1486 days ago
The problem with regulating what kind of tech you should use is that it can be surprisingly hard to change or update after the fact.

South Korea mandated usage of ActiveX in the 1990s as one of the first countries to push into online shopping, and it took until 2020 to get rid of it (and Internet Explorer) altogether.

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digisign 1486 days ago
It's unlikely mandating open standards would result in that flavor of lock-in.
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zinekeller 1480 days ago
> It's unlikely mandating open standards would result in that flavor of lock-in.

Considering the difficulty of switching from IPv4 to IPv6 and extremely creative ways to update TCP (before everyone gave up), I'm not sure of that.

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whywhywhywhy 1485 days ago
Is Office even the de facto outside of the accounting industries reliance on Excel?

Are most schools and offices not running Google Docs these days for the word processing/presentation side of things?

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