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Thursday, February 21st, 2008Dominic Connor writes on The RegDeveloper about the battle for hearts and minds in higher education computing departments:
“University computer science departments are rapidly becoming Microsoft-free zones, as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) combine with Java to become the de-facto standard environment for students of programming.
Microsoft knows from history that this will be fatal in the long term, hence its decision to extend free availability of core development tools to students. Most of my generation of computer science students quite literally never touched any IBM kit, even though - back then - it had a bigger share of the IT market than today is enjoyed by Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard put together.
We did C and Unix, and as we spread like plague rats out into employers, infecting them with the new wave …”
Dominic makes a particularly interesting point about the scope of Microsoft’s efforts in his concluding paragraph, but I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read it. The full article is here.