Microsoft chucks bargain bin at world's youth How does Microsoft tempt students into its development tools bandwagon? By parking it outside the school yard and promising free love and software to the tiny tots. The Redmond giant is teaming up with industry standards body the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to give its student members gratis access …
Sounds like sound business sense to me. Get the into Microsoft products early. It's a win win for all... The students can buy more beer with their hard earned, and Microsoft get more exposure at the college/university level. Of course, those students will take their MS experience with them into the job market, post graduation.
I would imagine most companies will be pleased too... If their graduate engineers arrive complete with a couple of years MS dev tools experience, cool! They're already further up the learning curve.
Yep. Looks like win win win to me. Don't see any bad side.
Of the course, the open source boys won't be happy... "It's not fair" etc etc... Yeah, well, that's what you get when you give your stuff away for free... Nothing. Including no money to market your non-money-making 'product' to people with no money.
I'm the Java crowd would love to do the same thing, but... No money for marketing, since it's free anyway...
So my hopes of getting install disks for Windows 2-point-something in order to try to "grandfather" a Logitech ScanMan handheld scanner up to 98SE are for naught? I'm sure it would be an extremely educational experience. I've already learned never again to buy Logitech hardware.
I would like to have a legal copy of XP Pro to play with, though.
Why would the IEEE support its young'uns heads be stuffed full of mush, full of security holes to boot?
Don't answer that. It's "realism" and "market forces" if it's not "massive bribes". But then maybe the IEEE *is* cheap. Much like micros~1 already not merely ballot-stuffed but shill-stuffed various countries' ISO committees. Wonder how that's working out for the rest of us.
Or is M$ the only company to make offers like this to students.
No different from many years ago, maybe still currently, a local garage used to give an old car to the schools engineering/metal work/mechanical dept, for the students to tinker with, and provide a mechanic/panel beater and tools to attend for a few hours each week. The pick of the students getting an apprenticeship if they desired.
Transferable skills. Panel beating is the same skill on a Ford or a Toyota, how well does experience on Exchange Server equip you for Notes, Sendmail, or Postfix?
Microsoft is trying to get early lock-in, a perfectly understandable aim for a commercial company, but should a professional organisation be supporting this?
The benhemot piece of software that requires at least three servers to split all of its miryad of role components to have a reasonable performance?
If I've read it correctly, I cannot see many students having such infrastructure on their basement. Then again, many people are looking at the hardware requirements and thinking about alternatives.
This has been up and running for over a year now and has most things except Office Standard and Win 7. While the 'old' OSs such as 2003 server are there, 2008 server also makes an appearance in Standard, Enterprise and Datacentre.
It was good to be able to get a copy of VS2008, Project and Visio. If MS wants to give me corporate tools for free then I'm more than willing to use them.
So the students have a choice between the free Open Source tools, or the "free" Microsoft tools (after they've paid for their IEEE membership dues), and they decide to get "hooked" on the Microsoft tools.
Are they too stupid to figure this out, or are you too stupid to figure out why they might actually want to use the Microsoft tools?
Not only does this reek of desperation, when I was a student, none of us joined IEEE because it gave us no tangiable benefits.
I predict that only one student is going to join and then give copies of the software away to his classmates - who aren't going to use it anyway because they've got the important business of STUDYING to get on with...
Studying, you know the thing students do so that the pass the exams?
> Studying, you know the thing students do so that the pass the exams?
I know the thing students do to pass the exams with another name, it's called having a small copy of last semesters exam in the pocket.
Coat, of course. Also a good place to put blank papers, write to them and pass to the only lady in CS.
"the old dope peddler"
It's the old dope peddler
Doing well by doing good.
He gives the kids free samples,
Because he knows full well
That today's young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow's clientele.
Here's a cure for all your troubles,
Here's an end to all distress.
It's the old dope peddler
With his powdered ha-happiness.
Is here:
Access 2003
Access 2003 (Español)
Access 2007
Compute Cluster Pack
Compute Cluster Pack SDK
Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition
Exchange Server 2007 Standard Edition
Expression Blend
Expression Studio
Expression Web
InfoPath 2003
InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005
InfoPath 2007
ISA Server 2006 Enterprise Edition
MapPoint 2004 European Edition - Setup Disk (1/2)
MapPoint 2004 European Edition - Run Disk (2/2)
MapPoint 2004 North America - Setup Disk (1/2)
MapPoint 2004 North America - Run Disk (2/2)
MELL - Developer Edition for MSDNAA
MSDN Library - April 2007 (DVD)
MSDN Library - May 2660 - CD1
MSDN Library - May 2660 - CD2
MSDN Library - May 2660 - CD3
Office Groove 2007
Office Groove Server 2007
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard
OneNote 2003
OneNote 2007
Project Professional 2003
Project Professional 2007
Project Server 2003
SharePoint Designer 2007
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition - 32-bit - CD1
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition - 32-bit - CD2
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition - 64-bit Extended - CD1
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition - 64-bit Extended - CD2
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition - 64-bit Extended - DVD
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition - 64-bit Itanium - DVD
SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition - 32-bit -0 DVD
Virtual PC 2004
Visio for Enterprise Architects
Visio Professional 2003 (Español)
Visio Professional 2007
Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
Visual J# .NET
Visual j# 2005 Express Edition
Visual SourceSafe 6.0d
Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional - Full Install
Visual Studio .NET 2005 Professional - Full Install
Visual Studio .NET 2002 - ISO Image - CD1 (Español)
Visual Studio .NET 2002 - ISO Image - CD2 (Español)
Visual Studio .NET 2002 - ISO Image - CD3 (Español)
Visual Studio .NET 2002 - ISO Image - CD4 (Español)
Visual Studio .NET 2002 - ISO Image - CD5 (Español)
Visual Studio .NET 2002 (Full) (Español)
Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition CD1
Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition CD2
Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition CD1
Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition CD2
Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Trial Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite - CD1
Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite - CD2
Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite - CD3
Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent Beta 2
Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System
Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (x86 and x64 WoW) - DVD
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
Windows Embedded CE 6.0 DVD
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition - 64 Bit
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (Español)
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition
Windows Services for UNIX 3.0
Windows Vista Business 64bit DVD
Windows Vista Business CD1
Windows Vista Business CD2
Windows Vista Business CD3
Windows Vista Business CD4
Windows Vista Business CD5
Windows Vista Business DVD
Windows XP Embedded
Windows XP Professional (Single User)
Windows XP Professional (Single User) 64bit Edition
Windows XP Professional (Single User) ISO Image (Español)
Windows XP Professional (Single User) ISO Image (Japanese)
Windows XP Professional with SP1a (Single User) ISO Image
Windows XP Professional with SP2 (Single User) ISO Image
Cutting edge it's not - but that's still a hell of a lot of software to be given away for free. SQL 2005, VSTS, VS 2008, Windows 2003, Vista and XP, Exchange, SharePoint, Expression, Visio and Access.
Not too sure why the cynical tone in the article. Guess it's bad for MS to hand this out, but fine for Canonical to have people standing outside handing out DVD's...
Of course the last versions of Windows with sensible hardware requirements were Windows 98, and, better yet, Windows 3.11 with Win32s. With that kind of Microsoft software and today's technology, they could probably do a laptop for the Third World for under 100 dollars - and, therefore, under 100 Euros as well.
If you're an "IEEE Student member", then you're likely a college student. If you're a college student, then your college only has to submit a little paperwork to offer MSDNAA to it's students. So exactly how many students interested in free MS stuff are IEEE members and study at colleges who don't participate in MSDNAA?
Somebody didn't do the math....
FOSS development tools are already free, Free and will continue to be. So when you go to get that all important job your likely to be pocketing more of the companies money programming with FOSS simply because there isn't a huge burden on the companies deployment costs.
Someone could do a study on that... oh wait they did.
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