I'm not German, but in the US I always thought it was a bit strange and concerning that we use taxdollars to train kids to use a proprietary, for-profit system. I understand that MS Office is (sadly) the industry standard, but how much of this is self-fulfilling, as in "it's the standard because that's what they teach, and it's what they teach because it's the standard".<p>You'll find similar things in school with software like Matlab; they give substantial discounts to universities for Matlab, these students because so used to it, and beg their employers to buy it, which they usually do.<p>Schools shouldn't be advertising vehicles for children, and I feel there should be a stronger emphasis on open technologies. Thank goodness MS can't create a proper equation editor to save their life, so LaTeX is still the standard for higher-level academia.
"This effectively leaves schools with few other options, unless Microsoft gets back to them with a satisfactory solution."<p>While businesses are obviously reluctant to use Libreoffice because they need perfect compatibility with MS Office files, K-12 students have no such constraints. What prevents the schools from standardizing on an open-source suite like Libreoffice?
Interesting, I just tweeted about Microsoft’s parental controls this morning:<p>> Windows 10 parental controls requires that both the parent and the kid have an email account and register with Microsoft.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1150667995745869824?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1150667995745869824?s=21</a>
The foundation of the MS empire is MS Office. People use office at work because it's the path of least resistance, due to fewer conversion errors (no conversion when you are using what everyone else does), and because that is what they used in school. Have the kids learn on LibreOffice, and MS Office only has one shaky leg to stand on.
I work at a university in Canada and it is the same unless they have cloud servers in Canada. I think we were on office 2010 till more recently. The patriot act allows US government access to any non americans data pretty easily, and it contradicts a lot of Canadian privacy law.
Turkey got few steps further:<p>Almost all ready made software recently become practically illegal to obtain in government tenders in Turkey due to "usability guarantee" requirement. Exact article translated (from the presidential administrative decree):<p><pre><code> All software and hardware contractors working for
Turkish government shall provide a guarantee stating
said soft/hard-ware does not contain backdoors and/or
features unfit for intended use, as far as possible.
</code></pre>
Servers for goverment services are also required to be in Turkey, even if it is not possible to set up one in situ in the respective institution. This goes so far to require all data processor to have their own or peered IXPs situated in Turkey.
Amusing. That's the data protection agency responsible for Schufa (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa</a>), which 15 of 16 German data protection agencies agree is breaking every relevant German data protection law. For some reason they disagree / are very lenient in their handling of Schufa. Maybe Microsoft should move their German HQ to Frankfurt or Wiesbaden.<p>(To make this clear: I think this is a good decision, but they are still hypocrites)
It's one of sixteen states. Office 365 (and Windows 10) have been identified as not being able to be used in accordance with data privacy laws in Germany time and time again. So far, nobody got fined for using either software yet.
It gets interesting. Of the three OS vendors - MS, Google, and Apple - only the latter made the effort to choose the privacy path, whereas the other two basically have a contemptuous attitude towards privacy expectations of their users. Times change, though, and we're likely to witness some interesting changes.
Having heard M$ executives talk about Office, I was somewhere between shocked, horrified and appalled at the enthusiasm with which they talked about mining (Office) user data to offer "intelligent" features. Absolutely zero concern about possible privacy issues. Not even on the radar.
The title makes it sound like this is a Germany wide thing. It's 'only' the state of Hesse which is around 6 million people. The responsibility for the education system in Germany lies primarily with the states.
It seems the simple solution for Microsoft is to just stand up a data center in Germany again. The simple solution for the rest of the software world is to let people choose where their data is stored. I wrote about this earlier today: <a href="https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-compliant/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-...</a>