The Case for Interoperability Part 1

Since I work for Microsoft, people always assume I hate Apple, Unix/Linux, and anything dealing with open source. They are equally surprised when I do my presentations on my Macbook, which by the way is a lovely machine to run Vista on. (Fastest Vista Notebook Is Macbook Pro) At any rate, I am actually getting quite tired of this "Us vs. Them" attitude I run across, because I feel it's mostly based on ignorance and emotion. People latch on to what they hear or see in the media and have this yearning to feel a part of something when oftentimes they haven't even experienced what they "believe" in first hand. For example, I come across the following scenario quite often:

Student: You're using Vista?!?!!!

Me: I surely am. It's not that bad actually. It's got a lot of productivity features that I like

Student: Vista sucks. I refuse to upgrade because I read it still has major bugs. X website gave it a bad review and said it was horrible and bloated. Hell even all the OEMs are refusing to get rid of XP and your executives were having problems (Microsoft Execs Have Vista Issues)

Me: So wait you haven't used it before and you formed an opinion already? We reached out to the hardware partners and asked them to come to our campus so we can help them develop drivers. Not many people took us up on our offer. We can't handhold companies to make them write drivers for our platform. They knew full well Vista was coming.

Student: Well I trust X website because they reviewed my video card and they were TOOOOOTALLY spot on.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. To bring this into my realm, I see this same mentality in the classroom. In the entry level courses, students are taught to program Java and have to do most of their work on Unix boxes. In the upper level courses, they have free reign to choose what they want to use as a language, but realistically, what student is going to stray from what they have been trained in? The shock comes to them when they go job hunting and see that most places want them to have some Windows experience. Last time I checked we still held a 70% global market share in enterprise(Numbers Don't Lie) and over 90% in the desktop realm (Numbers Don't Lie Part 2...Feel Free To Hate) and on top of that, we're gaining.

So how do we fix this problem? Well for one, we have to get rid of the cannibalistic attitude and embrace the 100% world. Why would I want my students to come out and only have 10-30% of the job market available to them? To me, that's negligent and irresponsible. Now I know people are going to say "well you can run Java on any machine" oooor "if you teach them properly, they can code in any language because they will have a good foundation." Gee, if it were only that easy. If you ask most college recruiters, they will tell you that students, on the average, are not adequately prepared to be successful in IT, development, or testing jobs. Is it the job of the student to self teach? Or should the school take some responsibility in preparation? The practical side of me says "Well if I spend $20k a year on school, I would expect to be prepared for any job when I graduated." The more diplomatic side of me says it's a combination of both. Students have to be active participants in their education. If they find some inadequacies or deficiencies in the curriculum, they need to voice their opinions to the administration. Industry also factors into the equation. We can't continue to grumble and go elsewhere to find talent. We have a duty to reach out and provide feedback to universities to help them properly cultivate these students.

That's where I come in.... Microsoft has a few initiatives that make professors and students' lives much easier.

DreamSpark: We give you our professional software for FREE. $FREE.99. It's available to anyone that's a college student. Check out the link for more details.

Students2Business: Microsoft only hires on average 3000 college grads per year. Our partners hire about 700,000 per year. PLEASE put your resume on this site. Microsoft commits to training you if you get hired through S2B.

Faculty Connection: Professors, students know you are lazy. They know you recycle tests and learning material each year. Faculty Connection helps you by giving you access to already done curriculum, labs, videos, and books on a variety of subject in many native languages(English, Spanish, Chinese, etc). Now you don't have ANY excuse to teach them XNA game programming or multithreaded programming with C#. Contact your ADE for an access code. It's also $FREE.99!!!!

MSDNAA: This is also available to STEM-D departments for $FREE.99!!!! There are tons of software offerings for students and it covers design, programming, and business applications with Dynamics. Contact your ADE to get access. We even host it for you so you don't have to administer an extra box.

I've said my piece. Part 2 of this series will focus specifically on integrating curriculum so stay tuned.