Re: Hardly surprising
I've spent a good portion of my career as an independent IT guy (I hate the word consultant) going into schools, removing the RM-specific stuff and giving them a group-policy equivalent that's easier to manage and MUCH cheaper. The dirty sods even do things like license a particular font that they put into butchered-versions of MS Word (that talk to you and all sorts of stuff) so when you move on, you either have to pay a fortune for a licence for the font or change all your old documents (and, sorry, but the font is horrid - but teachers love it for reasons I cannot fathom).
CC4 was the death-knell for me. I spent more time pulling schools from it than I ever spent managing it and the timing coincided with me going to full-time stable work in the same sector. I once took down an ENTIRE school network, clients and servers, by deploying an "CC4 package" (a msi with particular paths for particular things) with a space in the filename. I kid you not. No warnings, nothing. They updated the software to stop that happening eventually but that just shouldn't even be possible.
I went full-time for a school that I'd helped abandon RM (first formatting the RM kit and servers to re-use them as proper plain Windows - the speed up was so immense it was embarassing, and zero lost functionality - and then to new / extra servers clients with the money saved over the course of the year, even with my wages). From there, I moved further through primary, secondary, state and independent and ended up where I am now - in a school that stated in interview that they hated RM and would never touch their stuff again. Not the first school I'd heard that, by a long shot.
That RM was losing money on that hardware - well, that was just schools waking up to the fact that they were selling cheap junk for overbloated prices. The official RM support stories I have could turn your mind to jelly. They knew the capacitors suffered rot on a particular model of motherboard. Their solution? Issue you with a network card (the first thing to blow was the on-board networking). When the problem crept to the USB, they gave you a USB PCI card. Then a PCI graphics card. And only THEN did they tell you to scrap the machine because the caps were going to blow the machine up. Their engineers knew the sequence off by heart, they'd dealt with it so much on that model and would have the next card ready for you. Rather than REPLACE the damn motherboard.
Their software and online services are their only saving grace (didn't they buy Ranger years ago?), but even there they're being pushed out of the market. The one piece of software of theirs that I love (as a mathematician) is RM Maths. As an IT guy, I hate it.
I also have had PC's shipped direct from RM with no motherboard jumpers (just beep-beep-beep on turn-on, and not even rattling around inside the case, literally not present at all). One school had sent back three PC's repeatedly over the course of a year and still weren't working. On a pseudo-interview to work for them, I spotted them and asked about them. They have been verifiably back to RM several times for "repair" and each time came back broken. I asked if I could take a look. Turned it on. "CMOS Checksum Error". I kid you not. Sent one of the teachers to the local shop for a pack of CR2025's, those three PC's worked flawlessly (as possible for RM stuff) for four years. I literally got offered the job on the spot.
Let's not even mention the Borough-lock-in that they negotiate so that entire swathes of schools are told they can ONLY be supported on RM equipment and nothing else. Didn't stop me making a career from taking on those schools not willing to play ball with such monopolisation, in fact it just made me more popular.
But RM? Total shower.
(Offtopic: I was talking to a guy the other day who designed the RM Nimbus and, as part of that, the M in the RM logo. Interesting guy, but even he was so disillusioned with RM that he mocked them even though they had paid his pension long ago and he is now making a nice career selling 3D printers to schools and lecturing at a university while the RM pension keeps him in funny hats).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
