Choosing Microsoft as your primary cloud solution is picking the wrong side of history

Wayne “The Great One” Gretzky, Canada’s national treasure, when asked what made him one of the greatest hockey players to ever grace the ice in the world, opined “I trained myself to skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck is, or where it’s been.” Choosing Microsoft is to go to where the puck was, choosing Google is to think like The Great One.

One only needs to look to future students to know where technology is heading; from kindergarten to seniors, high schoolers are being armed with Chromebooks and using Google for Education, to ignore this is to put your organization at great peril. 

My son’s kindergarten’s entire school district has started using Google for Education, and this is not unusual, from New York to Alabama to California we’re experiencing this sea change. It is, in fact, a wise choice, not only because it’s an affordable option when one looks at the price of a Chromebook, but importantly collaboration tools between teachers and students, ease of use, and keeping the focus on learning through applications that aren’t full of clutter.

Choosing Google for Education colleges and universities need to do to stay relevant, to do so otherwise is to put themselves at a disadvantage, gambling in a landscape where school choices are plentiful, costs are rising, and outcomes are uncertain. Children and their parents can easily pull the trigger on many similar colleges to your own, why would you add a potential barrier to a potential student?

A cautionary tale: One State University of New York school tried to become a Microsoft-only campus and within a couple years enrollment dropped precipitously while others in SUNY flourished, the reason, students and some employees were not impressed. The lost potential students and they lost faculty and staff talent who knew better than their administration and IT’s leadership, or lack – don’t be like that school.  

Yes, Microsoft for Education exists, but like all things Microsoft, it’s behind the curve, full of haphazard choppy decisions in a lackluster bid to stay relevant. While doing so Microsoft, unlike Google, comes at great costs to schools in a time where they need to save money. Microsoft of Education comes with a fee per user, licenses, plus the biggest expense, people by way of payroll dollars to run it that should be spent elsewhere. When you have a head of an IT department stumping hard for Microsoft, beyond just the fact that person is holding back your organization, be wary immediately that she or he is doing so to pad out his department with workers adding costs to your bottom line, most likely in a bid to keep outdated, outmoded workers who don’t want to retrain for advancing technologies. 

If there’s ever a metaphor-by-product of how woefully inept Microsoft is, one need only look at their sad sack excuse for browsers. Be it the worst of the worst Internet Explorer, or its replacement, the confounding bad in other ways Microsoft Edge. Instead of using open standards all other browsers use with the customer coming first, Microsoft again decided to create their own obtuse, frustratingly lackluster, and rogue standards in an attempt to try to force others to go along with their misadventures. Their browser is a metaphor for Microsoft as a whole – clueless and broken and, by extension, organizations that adopt Microsoft solutions buy into this ineptitude as well. 

Truth the told, there’s nothing wrong with schools offering both Google and Microsoft, though Google has the edge over almost all Microsoft offerings, it can’t hurt if an organization is reluctant to embrace the future or having to support some legacy systems or legacy employees, as it were, provided there’s a plan to migrate or justifications to keep outdated technology in a silo.

This said, many colleges and universities have gone all-in with Google as my previous employer did back in 2008, and the results have been spectacular, SUNY Oswego is flourishing, especially on the tech side of things. Many campuses are heading that direction which with cloud help allow for education, anywhere, with ease-of-use products with low to no cost of entry – this is putting the students, the customers of higher education – first, which is the right business practice.

In the best IT departments, from managers to their employees, realize technology never sleeps, to not look to the past but the future for where their clients and world is heading. Embracing the direction technology is going is what the best tech people do, the good ones know to do so otherwise is at the detriment of not only their organization’s longevity, but their careers as well. Top programmers and developers in the business aren’t wired to settle and, to that end, ithe best are highly paid. Monikers like Microsoft Certified were great in 1997 but in 2018 holds little weight unless one works at a conservative out-of-touch organization ignoring the march of progress and clinging to the past.

Dead or (thankfully) near-dead languages that used to be the rage like .Net, Perl, Ruby, and Pascal are going the way of BASIC; the immediate future belongs to PHP, JavaScript, Java, and to some degree Python, Objective C and J. If you have an IT department clinging to the former and not the latter, it’s time for serious organizational review because if you don’t change with the times, the times will change you, and by change, make you irrelevant. 

I've my own anecdote to change or die of tech. In 2006 I won an award in Flash design, specifically in higher education, and had been creating Flash animations long before Adobe bought Macromedia. In 2009 I gave a talk at a conference that Flash was dead, which confused some people, especially as it was the same conference where I had won the award three years previously.

The iPhone and the resultant mobile revolution effectively killed Flash and I, for one, was completely fine with it. Flash, like programming languages, like apps, have lifespans. Flash, like Microsoft was, and Google is, are merely tools for the job. The best craftsman continually pick the right tool for the job and don't rest on using a banana when the hammer is better to drive a nail.

I really can frame this another way: What, to you or the general population sounds more progressive, more tech-savvy of an organization?

Microsoft solutions?

Google solutions?

Perception is also a reality. Stay with the solutions of the past or move to the solutions of the future. 

As Sir Ken Robinson said in his famous “Do Schools Kill Creativity” TED Talk, we have to teach for a future we can’t see, but our kids will. Where we’ll be in 20 or 30 years is anyone’s guess, but for now, the future at this moment belongs to Google; smart organizations embrace this.

PS To get a sense of how Microsoft products, read the Twitter comments on this Tweet. The opinions are pretty indicative of people’s “love” of their products and why you shouldn’t stake your business on Microsoft solutions.