May 20, 2008
Microsoft Offers Free Advanced Design Programs to Students
For no charge, college students can now get their hands on advanced Microsoft development and design tools—the DreamSpark suite of programs—without the software giant or any other outside vendor getting their hands on students’ personal information.
The company said today that it would join the InCommon Federation, a “one-stop shop” that lets a college student access dozens of different outside resources, such as journal archives or Microsoft programs, with just one log-on, rather than remembering different passwords and log-on names for every site they need to access. The first approach, with the single log-on controlled by InCommon and the university, is the cutting-edge in identity-management on the Internet. That second approach, of course, is a royal pain.
InCommon, which is administered by Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium, serves more than 80 higher education institutions and service providers, with close to 2 million users. The idea behind it, as The Chronicle has reported, is that all a student needs to do is provide their university credentials. As long as that university is part of InCommon, the door is opened to a world of resources. Now that world includes Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Expression Studio, Windows Server Standard Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition.—Josh Fischman
Posted on Tuesday May 20, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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Your policy of offering tempting reading only if the reader forks over the price of a subscription is truly tacky, and even cruel to those who simply can’t afford it.
— ArchiesBoy May 20, 12:22 PM #
Ah yes, the age-old Microsoft marketing strategy: ‘get them edjumacated on OUR software so that companies will pay big bucks for it because it’s what all their new employees know’. First Windows, then Office, now DreamSpark. Isn’t this an unfair competitive advantage? Small startup software developers can’t afford to do this. Long live the monopoly!
— a different Dan May 21, 09:42 AM #
Hey, it worked for Apple, at least in the case of arts and design.
— Mac Hack May 21, 10:06 AM #
ArchiesBoy, who do you think is paying for the people who have to work on this thing to produce it? It’s about as cruel as the $.50 you have to put in for the daily paper at the corner machine. And this is vastly more polite than the first version I typed.
— everything free, wait, we don't have anything... May 21, 10:53 AM #
Uhhh…what academic e-journal providers are going to provide “free” access to quality content when they can charge university libraries &/or individual researchers hundreds of thousands of dollars?
— JayAre May 21, 01:51 PM #