[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[Kirby Urner]

Hi Arthur --

I really do try to understand your concerns about businesses touting their
efforts in the education arena, and how much that concerns you.

For me it's more about recruiting i.e. for Microsoft to keep a new
generation of talent working in Redmond, it needs to have appeal as an
employer, plus needs kids growing up to know something of the Microsoft way
and lore.  Windows, X-Box and such.  If all home schoolers use are Linux and
OS X, and same for a generous pie slice of school computer labs, that's
maybe not so good, in terms of attracting future talented, fun & friendly
coworkers.

But Microsoft is not so narrow as to only care about Windows or Office or
SQL Server.  The .NET technology, which we've been discussing in this
thread, is a promising platform for Python, and .NET has a footprint in
Linux, in the form of Mono.  The technology is, once again, cross platform,
and that has a lot of appeal (I can even run Mono on Windows -- have it on
my Toshiba A60 WinXP laptop in fact, left over from OSCON 2005).  

Having lots of options is generally good for client businesses such as mine.
We don't like getting locked in to pricing structures, not Microsoft's, not
anyone's. Open source often looks a lot less predatory to small businesses,
even if harder to grok.  The programmer you hire is surviving on the basis
of skills, not secret access to back door source code.  The code is in the
open.  Kung fu is on merit, not unfair advantage.

Python, for its part, tends to go cross-platform because of its VM
architecture.  Like Java, it's designed to leave interpretation of the low
level byte codes to something native, written in something fast.  C, Java
and C#/CIL have been the VM source languages so far -- at least those are
the ones I know a little about (I'm not so sure what's in that Nokia cell
phone).

I'd be concerned if just one or two big companies felt they could hijack and
control our curriculum, but having thousands upon millions of competing
firms hawking their education-relevance doesn't so far bother me.  Free
speech and all that.  If you want to position as a friendly-to-kids, yet
commercially minded education company, go right ahead.  There's nothing
sleazy about that in pure principle (you're just recruiting coworkers), and
sure, there're lots of opportunities to mess up.  Conclusion: there's no
promise you'll succeed, but you do have the right to try, is my attitude.

Kirby