Microsoft Matters Less???
Christopher Dawson has an educational technology management blog on the ZDNet site. In today’s post, he talks about how Microsoft is becoming less important as an operating system vendor. Christopher is using Ubuntu in the lab in his school with great success and student interest.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Ubuntu, OS X or anything other non-Windows OS in a school. Students should be given as much exposure to as many different technology tools as possible. But to place any other operating system on the same level as Microsoft’s OS just isn’t right. Here are yesterday’s stats from w3counter.
| Operating Systems | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windows XP | 81.02% |
| 2 | Mac OS X | 4.46% |
| 3 | Windows Vista | 4.14% |
| 4 | Windows 2000 | 3.81% |
| 5 | Linux | 1.70% |
| 6 | Windows 98 | 1.27% |
| 7 | Windows 2003 | 0.74% |
| 8 | Windows ME | 0.44% |
| 9 | Windows NT | 0.06% |
| 10 | Mac PowerPC | 0.03% |
I’m not sure why OS X isn’t broken down into the various versions (Cheetah, Jaguar, Panther, etc). Given the fact that all distributions of Linux put together have just edged out Windows 98, there probably isn’t a single distro that would be much more than a blip on the radar.
If you put all the versions of Window together and look at all the data available on w3counter’s site, you get a chart like this:
At its current rate of decline, Microsoft will matter a lot less in about twenty years. There was one jump in the data that I plan to watch. OS X went from 3.79% on Oct 10, to 4.46% on Oct 20. I am interested in seeing where OS X is at the end of the month.
I think all the OS talk is wasted wind. We should focus on teaching our students how to learn something new quickly and to manage information within any environment. In twenty years those skills will matter.
October 24th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Let’s see. 20 years ago, I was using MS-DOS 3 running Turbo Pascal from a 360 K floppy disk. Good thing I still remember Control-KS to save, and Control-KD to quit. By the time they get out of college, our kids won’t be running any of the software we have installed in our schools. But if they know, for example, that margins can be changed, they can figure out how to do it in the word processor du jour (unless it’s OpenOffice
).
I’m finding a lot of people who have serious gaps in their technology skills, including basic things like working with folders, using file extensions, and selecting non-default printers. I’d argue that some of the modern operating systems are insulating the users a little too much, and keeping them from adapting as things change.