Just say no; Britain refuses to adopt next generation of Microsoft products
In a rather controversial move, the British public school system announced a countrywide policy decision that it will not adopt Microsoft's Windows Vista or Office 2007 in its schools and offices.
The move is the latest in a series of woes for the struggling Vista. Despite sufficient sales, the operating system has failed to obtain high marks from many critics. Its detractors included PC World after it featured the OS as its disappointment of the year.
Analysts point to the numerous performance and security issues that have caused the OS to struggle to match the success of Windows XP, particularly in the face of Apple Inc.'s stylish OS X Leopard. Despite being outsold considerably by Vista, Leopard managed to steal much of the media attention and glowing reviews.
The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, also known as Becta, governs the educational systems tech adoption. Becta's decision effectively bans adoption of Office '07 and Vista on any existing machines. Government employees can buy new machines with the software, but the agency strongly recommends against it; suggesting instead to buy Linux products, such as the OpenOffice.org desktop package.
The reasoning behind Becta's decision specifically cited that the new OS and office suite provides little in the way of improvement, while bringing to the table a broad array of potential problems. In the report Stephen Lucy, Becta's executive director of strategic technologies, explains, "Our advice is to be sure there is a strong
business case for upgrading to these products as the costs are
significant and the benefits remain unclear."
The report also blasted Microsoft for refusing to support the Open Document Format (ODF), championed by International Organization for Standardization. Microsoft instead chose to adopt another open format known as Office Open XML. The report states, "Microsoft should provide native support for the ODF file format
increasingly used in competitor products and those that are free to
use."
The move follows suit with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) decision ban Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7 due to similar concerns.
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