Something Rotten In Hungary

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451

Something Rotten in Hungary

Posted by: Joseph Ottinger on május 21, 2008 DIGG

On Monday, May 19, 2008 Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, paid a visit to
Budapest, the Hungarian capital. It is a visit that no one would have
noticed had it not been for a disgruntled student's attempt to pelt
Steve Ballmer with eggs. Written on the back of the students shirt was
"Microsoft = Corruption." Fortunately for Steve, the student's aim was
as bad as his ability to deliver his message and see the real issue at
hand, big business trying to influence educational systems for their own
gain.

Compared to their enormous success on the desktop, Microsoft has had
very little penetration into any of the other areas of computing such as
large enterprise wide systems and small devices embedded into consumer
items such as cars and cell phones. Now they are facing the challenge of
losing "mind-share" to Linux and other operating systems. Furthering
Microsoft's troubles are mandates from governments that their
departments must use software that falls under an open source licensing
arrangement. Open source software is not only "free" as in free of cost,
it is also free from many of the restrictions that companies like
Microsoft place on users of their software. Even more troubling to
Microsoft is that the source code is freely available and modifiable to
everyone making it a very attractive alternative to those not wishing to
be bound to a software vendor.

This policy has been very successful for Brazil. They now have what is
widely seen as one of the most advanced and cost effective health care
administration systems, completely based on open source software.
Following on the tail of that success is a complete reformation of the
software supporting their tax system as well as other major systems.

Interestingly enough, the open policies adopted by the Brazilians don't
lock Microsoft out of the picture. One can still interact with the tax
system while running Windows. However, moving away from a Microsoft
solution means that you are not forced to use Windows to interact with
the tax system. Even so, the consequence of moving to open source is
very clear to Microsoft -the company understands that open source
software marginalizes the value of traditionally licensed closed sourced
software such as Windows. It is no wonder that Microsoft sees the open
source movement as a force to be reckoned with. This animosity is very
visible in a well-publicized leak of hostility towards open source (the
"Halloween memos") and subsequent promises of cooperation (see
"Microsoft pledges not to sue over open source," for an example).

One of the ways to win in this industry is to excite developers about
your technology. Youtube has many references to the legendary video of
Steve Ballmer dancing around on stage[1] chanting "developers developers
developers, developers developer developers...." at a large Microsoft
conference (MIX, in Las Vegas). He's simply trying to get developers
excited about Microsoft. It works like this: if a business uses an
application that requires Windows, he wins. Applications need to be
developed. Who develops them? Well, developers, of course. Therefore,
Microsoft has to cater to developers. In fact, every technology company
has to cater to developers.

Yet in courting developers to choose Microsoft, he has to make early
adopters happy, so they are attracted to and refuse to leave the
Microsoft development camp, while trying to maintain some sense of
stability for those who don't like change. The early adopters are the
"visible developers," those who blog for lots of readers, and whose
attentions develop viral mindshare; the group that doesn't like change
is a vast, silent majority, as most developers never move away from the
computer languages and tools that they learned how to use in school.
Here's how Microsoft's Titan program is designed: it teaches new
developers all about Microsoft - as a captive audience, more or less -
so that Microsoft will be their choice of the future.

Microsoft isn't unique in this: Apple used to do the same kind of thing
by providing inexpensive hardware to schools in the United States, where
you'd find Macs (and, previously, Apple ][ machines) littering
computer-related classrooms across the nation. The difference is that
Apple contributed hardware and software to institutions without
demanding control of what was being taught - and schools were relatively
easy to find who chose to use something other than Apple's hardware.

In the end, Steve Ballmer is doing what any good CEO should be doing, by
recognizing where to best put his efforts to best sell his company to
the world. Clearly, Mr. Ballmer sees the young minds as being valuable
enough to invest 10 billion HUF (~40,000,000 Euro) in them. He's even
has done something even better for his share holders: he has figured how
to make this investment using someone else's money - namely, the EU
taxpayers' money.

Another set of players here are the Prime Minister of Hungary, Ferenc
Gyurcsány, and his minister of education, István Hiller. For their part,
they get to offload 10 billion HUF from their state education budget,
not a small sum of money for a small country. To get this money
offloaded, all they had to do was to turn over control of the states' IT
curriculum to Steve Ballmer - which sounds like a win-win for all.
Indeed it does look good for everyone until you consider the third party
in the deal: the students. Is this really a win for the students or have
their interests been betrayed by the custodians of their future?

The short-term benefit of Titan are quite clear: Hungarian schools will
receive some badly needed hardware and support. That said, it is
difficult to assess the long term benefits to students as a result of
Titan, as Titan is very poorly documented on the web. If Titan ends up
binding a syllabus to Microsoft - then students run the risk of learning
specific technology, leaving them unprepared for real work. (After all,
chances are good that what seemed important to you, as a student, is far
less important in the "real world," and one hopes that what you actually
learned prepared you for the life in which you found yourself.)

Contrast this to a world where the goals are to appease investors this
quarter or this fiscal year. There's nothing inherently wrong with this
kind of business-oriented approach designed to benefit investors - and
it's mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United
States. However, this approach is very short-sighted for an education
system, because something that is in vogue today isn't necessarily going
to be appropriate in two years. The fear in the case of Titan is
somewhat magnified in that the current Hungarian government is betting
every IT student's future on the success of a single (albeit large)
corporations technology's ability to stay perfectly relevant. An even
bigger danger in locking in one's educational system to a single
technology stack is that curricula will likely ignore all the other
possibilities. While this may be in Hungary's short term interests, it
is clearly not in its longer term interests - especially since the
proposed Titan project ends in 2012. What happens then, if the education
system has already committed itself to MS technologies?

Even more interesting is the EU's role in this deal. Remember, even
though Microsoft, Cisco, HP, and a few others are at the helm, it is the
EU that is writing the check. How is it that these funds that are
potentially locking Hungary's future into a proprietary vendor could not
be made available to a more balanced offering? Could there not be an
offering not controlled by individual companies? Wouldn't it be better
for the EU government to enrich the public domain by fostering support
for open learning and processes in Universities? After all, education is
about learning and sharing and this has a lot more in common with open
source than it does with proprietary commercial products. So while the
student protest may have been for a different reason, it did highlight a
question that all Hungarians and indeed citizens of other countries need
to answer: what do we want from our educational system? You have the
right to ask, you are paying for it.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE