Posts Tagged → microsoft

Is This What You’d Call a “PC”?

I’ve been working on a presentation for the VSTE Mobile Learning Conferences (one next week and another the week after), which means I’m paying more attention to anything related to the subject at hand.

Like this view of the tablet business from the president of Microsoft phone division.

The use of the mobile OS would be “in conflict” with Microsoft’s notion of having the full speed of a computer in any design, including truly mobile tablets. He insisted that users would want to do PC-style activities on a tablet and saw Windows 8’s networking and printing support as being important.

“We view a tablet as a PC,” Lees said.

Interesting. I think I’m doing a “PC-style” activity, namely writing this post, on this iPad right now.

Anyway, I suppose it really depends on what you want, when, and how you want to do those PC-style activities. Certainly I’m not going to write the great American novel on this thing (not without using a bluetooth keyboard) or work with complex spreadsheets.

But I can edit video, record audio, and create music, as well as do a whole host of other things that a few years ago would be considered “PC activities”. And more functionality is being added every day, some of which would be difficult to do on your standard PC.

So, while the concept of what is considered a computer is getting fuzzier, the remarks of this exec makes very clear the distinction between Apple’s concept of post-PC devices and Microsoft’s dedication to more PCs.

I rather like the post-PC vision.

ISTE Quick Thoughts: While We Were Busy

The game just changed.

At least according to headline on the full-page Microsoft ad in the USA Today that was left at my hotel room door this morning. The company was announcing the release of Office 365, the cloud-based version of their classic suite of productivity tools.

I wonder if this move to the cloud by the dominant company in business computing will have much impact on the schools and colleges represented here at ISTE. In many if not most sessions, presenters were showing how they are already using web applications with their students to do the same kinds of things they might have used Office (or something similar) for five, eight, ten years ago.

Certainly there’s Google Docs but also a large and growing number of other sites that make it easy to collect, manage, share, and present information. Most are free, or cost far less than the $6 – 27 a month per user Microsoft wants, depending on how many pieces of Office 365 you rent.

So, will there be a big demand in schools for a cloud-based version of Word and PowerPoint? Is this something businesses will pay for?

To Microsoft or Not to Microsoft

Continuing with the set up of my new MacBook Pro comes the question of whether or not I install Office.

It’s not a matter of cost since I have access to a copy (legally!) through our district’s license.

And I certainly have enough memory and hard drive space, even for a bloated, clunky package like this one.

But do I need it?

For the most part I don’t use Word, instead doing my writing in TextEdit, Apple’s excellent text editor, and increasingly in Evernote and Google Docs.

I already have an older copy of iWork which seems to open the fancier Word documents I receive just fine and it has an excellent spreadsheet program that handles Excel just fine.

iWork also includes Keynote which beats the hell out of PowerPoint for the few slide show presentations I give.

So, why do I need Microsoft?

I know that eventually I’ll set up a Windows partition on this machine, mainly so I can access those few features of Outlook I can’t get to with the outstanding Exchange support in Snow Leopard.

Plus web resources created by our IT department that only run in IE and those occasional files that come my way created with Publisher, the lame attempt at a page layout program that comes with our version of Office.

Ok, I guess I’ve talked myself out sullying the Mac side of this new machine with Office. :-)

But if anyone can think of a good reason to install that package, I may reconsider.

Email is not Necessarily Communication

The tech news from the past couple of weeks has been rather interesting over with two giant tech companies making big announcements about very different products.

For one Microsoft rolled out their third major attempt to take some of the internet search business (and the ad revenue that goes with it) from Google, named Bing (“the first ever decision engine”?)

Google, on the other hand, demonstrated once again that they are looking at a much bigger picture, beyond simply providing tools for finding web pages.

At their annual developers conference, the company showed off Wave, browser-based software that is probably best described as a communications platform.

Watching the video (and you really should to better understand what they’re attempting to do) left me with a couple of big impressions.

First, the software itself may not be the most unique thing about Wave.

The most interesting part is that this major new product was being shown to the world in a very beta condition (it crashed at least twice by my count) and the company was inviting anyone to tinker with the guts.

Wave will be open source with a large set of completely open APIs and Google is encouraging people to not only write applications for it but even build businesses on top of it.

Maybe our students should be given the option of learning Google development tools as an alternative to Microsoft certifications. The difference between gaining entrepreneurial skills and being locked into someone else’s concepts?

Anyway, the other thought running through my head was about the crappy the communications tools we are stuck with.

In our overly-large school district, we use Microsoft’s Outlook which is pretty mediocre for an email system.

It’s even worse when it comes to actual communication and collaboration, especially when trying to work outside the MS bubble on mobile devices and non-IE browsers.

Ok, I’m not ready to assign miracle properties to Wave based on one demonstration.

However, watching the Google development team explain their vision for this new platform offers a striking contrast between the traditional concept of email (to which we seem wedded) and open, flexible tools that actually foster connections between people.

I wonder if our administrators might be willing to spend a small fraction of the millions we pay to maintain the largest single MS Exchange installation (that’s NOT a good thing) to develop Wave applications for the educational community.

Probably not.

The High Cost of Bells and Whistles

My alma mater, the University of Arizona, is strongly considering dumping their current email system and switching to Google Docs for Education.

In addition to mail, students and faculty will get the whole Docs package, collaborative office tools, calendars, a chat system, and personal web sites.

Casap [Google’s rep] said that it does not make sense for universities to provide an e-mail service when something like Google Apps can provide it to universities for free. He also said that the Google supported e-mail could be branded to the university.

So let’s see: the U of A has more than four times the number of students and faculty than the number of staff in our overly-large school district (we don’t provide email for students).

But our administration sees a need to send the Big Monopoly of Redmond a large (LARGE!) annual check for Office and Outlook licenses, on top of the cost of paying for dozens of servers and people to keep the email flowing.

Ok, I know Google Docs doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, not to mention doodads, that are in the BM’s products.

However, the number of people in our system who actually use those very high priced extras could probably fit in a small high school auditorium.