Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

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. 

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.