I was chatting with a contact I have who is fairly high up in IBM, and he posed the question to me, what can IBM do to foster the adoption of open standards software and systems in higher education?
IBM, of course, is in the business of making money, so everything they do is with an eye to the bottom line. As a fundamental business strategy, some time ago, IBM made the decision to embrace open standards in a major way. IBM does a huge amount of business in hardware on college campuses, and they do a substantial amount of business in open standards software, mainly AIX (IBM's version of unix). The overwhelming leader in software on campus, though, is Microsoft, with whom IBM has had a love-hate relationship going way back. (Right now, I think it's more hate.) So IBM's question is, to paraphrase, how can IBM help to reduce Microsoft's market share of proprietary software on college campuses by supporting or fostering alternative open standards software (and then IBM will hope to piggyback onto that trend and make money by helping to provide some of those open standards solutions)? So I'm curious: from your personal point of view, what do you think a big corporation like IBM could do to foster the adoption of open standards software and systems (from any source, not just IBM) in the higher education arena in general and at Truman specifically? -- Jon Beck, PhD mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Assoc Professor, Computer Science 2162 Violette Hall Truman State University 660-785-7233 Kirksville, MO 63501 http://vh216202.truman.edu/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
