On Sunday 03 Oct 2010 19:34:28 Wolfgang Bornath wrote: > 2010/10/3 andré <and...@laposte.net>: > > Targeting the school boards makes a lot of sense. > > Again this is something you can not generalize, different countries > have different structures. > In Germany it is not a school board who decides what software will be > bought for a certain region or school. This is decided on state level > for the various states of the federal republic. You have to go to some > state office and compete with the reps of Microsoft. You do not talk > to parents or teachers, it's some bureaucrats who decide this over > here (with very few exceptions). > > Same with many other countries. This school board system as in the US > is not a world wide system.
Marc is talking about Canada and despite rumours to the contrary, Canada is as much a part of the US as New Zealand is a part of Australia. And In fact in all of these countries and the UK as a matter of fact, software purchase is a school decision. Education Departments, as in NZ, may negotiate with vendors for a block price for schools but the purchase is the schools decision. Targeting schools does make a lot of sense in a Global context. One local school here just went with Ubuntu on 1500 netbooks http://manaiakalani.blogspot.com/search/label/1%3A1 which will be one for every student. Interestingly they don't actually advertise the OS, although they will be using the go-oo.org version of OOo because of it's Googledocs/Zoho integration. There are a lot of other examples, you can talk to the people at the sharp end on the K12OSN maillist if you want. It is a significant market, just ask MS, they bleed just to keep a toehold.. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant. INGOTs Assessor Trainer (International Grades in Open Technologies) www.theingots.org
