The coordinated monopoly
Why bother doing the dirty work of "cutting off the air supply" of your competitors, when you can have state-sponsored organizations do it for you? This must be what Microsoft is thinking. For the second time in no time, an organization funded by the Danish government has decided to live in the fairy-tale world of the single holy, hobgoblin operating system.
The coordinated enrollment (TCE) that handles enrollment for all higher educations in Denmark has gone digital. Or rather, it has gone migital. You know, that special kind digital operations that only works on big M setups. But a graver insult has been reserved for their greeting screen:
Which implies that I'm in error by attempting to use this site with anything else but Windows, IE, and Acrobat Reader. Never mind the fact that OS X handles PDF's and Java natively, the two technologies at the core of TCE, and Windows does not.
But it gets better (or actually, worse). Mediamac asked the man in charge for an explanation of this blatant disregard for computing choice. That man is Anker Hoch, who deliberately made the choice to shaft choice.
To his defense he offers a false dilemma (either we only support PC or nobody gets nothing) along with an unrelated and irrelevant retelling of wants (young people want online TCE):
"It's a deliberate choice from our side. We wanted to get the project going, and can offer that to 98% of our customers then we strongly believe that's better than none at all. There's a lot of young people around the world who have longed for online access to TCE".
To get a solution that also worked on Mac, it would apparently have costed $8-10,000 more and postponed the project beyond the imaginary February 2nd deadline. But why wasn't this included as a constraint in the original project definition? If TCE had informed bidders for the project that multi-platform access was a must, it's highly unlikely that the price tag would have been $10K + missed deadline.
This is another unacceptable display of computing discrimination and support for a convicted monopolist in furthering said monopoly carried out by an institution funded by the Danish government. This makes me sad :(
