It is from our needs and our visions as eductors that we have to work back to the technology. Our universities are supposed to be places of higher education. Standardization, if one is manufacturing a million widgets a day, is a good thing. A routine exploration of the World-Wide Web has let me to a pair of sites that officials in Idaho and Texas may wish to know about. It is apparent that even in education we to fail to see the forest for the trees.
Monopolies are bad for consumer value and choice.
My personal experience with this issue is my sole reason for commenting. The biggest threat to higher education is the way Microsoft products and lack of standards in engineer. Education is not the place for the brain washing marketing tactics that Microsoft has been pushing. Microsoft has not done anything that has not made money for Microsoft. Microsoft already has its foot in the door when it comes to the computing environments that students use.