COLLOQUY

As a student in Washington state, I got a good taste of Microsoft's "good will." I, along with a few hundred other students, signed up for the second in a series of Internet Resources classes. I was surprised to find that a Microsoft consultant was teaching the class, but optimistic. And, oooh, we all got a free pre-release copy of InterDev to use.

And so began my descent into hell. We were expected to use this Microsoft gift and nothing else. We were told we didn't need to learn any more HTML; Front Page would do it all. We didn't need to learn about CGI or Perl, either; the almost-automatic VB Script functions would do it for us. After all, we weren't "real" computer people and couldn't do all that complicated coding stuff -- just don't ask questions and use the software.

Half the class time was spent trying to figure out why InterDev didn't work; it was usually blamed on using the evil Netscape, some other "non-compatible" (read non-Microsoft program) or not having a computer fast enough or with enough memory. When non-Microsoft products weren't being degraded, we were being preached pure Microsoft propaganda.

And I payed tuition at a state university for this!

At the end of the quarter, I saw only a handful of working final projects. I gave up halfway through the quarter and learned about the real magic of Linux. I produced a working site using PHP and Apache, which I learned about on my own time. My instructor marked me down because he couldn't figure out what made the code work. When I wrote him about it, he informed me that he had washed his hands of the lot of us and not to bother him again.

That taste of a real Microsoft microcosm, full of self praise, denial and crappy software, left a foul taste in my mouth. It gets worse with every news article about their fake grass roots campaigns and their bribes to professors and ISPs to push their products.

Microsoft is too much propaganda and too little substance and the schools that prostitute themselves for Microsoft money will get what Western's getting: students who are incapable of using anything else.

Support freeware and innovation; fight against monopolies and stagnation. Use products like Linux, Apache and Gimp. Don't know what those are? Don't you owe it to yourself to find out?

-- Disillusioned with the Evil Empire, graduate, WWU (posted 4/23, 9:45 a.m., E.D.T.)

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