Microsoft plans to arm
students with the company's developer and design tools for free to help
them fulfill their creative goals now and to help seed the market for
developers working on the Microsoft platform in the future.
In a speech scheduled for Feb. 19 at Stanford University, Microsoft
Chairman Bill Gates is expected to formally launch the effort known as
the Microsoft DreamSpark student program. The DreamSpark program makes
available, at no charge, a broad range of development and design
software for download. The program is now available to more than 35
million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Joe Wilson, senior director of Academic Initiatives for Developer
and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, said, "The software is one of the
greatest currencies we have that we can give to students. We'll make
any pro-level designer and development tools available to university
students now and to high school students in the fall. We hope it will
make a big difference with students in school and also be a head start
for their careers."
The DreamSpark program includes free access to Microsoft development
tools including Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio
2008 Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio 2.0, and a 12-month free
academic membership in the XNA Creators Club. The designer tools
covered by the program include the Expression Studio, which consists of
Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, and Expression
Media. Microsoft also is providing students free licenses to SQL Server
2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server, Standard Edition, as part of
the program, Wilson said.
Some observers said they view the program as another Microsoft
initiative to not only draw more developers to the Microsoft platform,
but to catch them while they are young and before they might become
entrenched in Java or open-source tools.
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Inc., said, "Every vendor
understands that keeping a computing platform healthy and up to date
requires regular infusions of new blood, i.e., programmers and
developers. By proactively offerings students free access to
development tools and software, Microsoft aims to help create fresh
interest in and future development on Windows platforms. The main
challenge will be in how they decide to measure the program’s success.
Will it be in the sheer number of student downloads or will they try to
track events like new product/tool developments arising from those
downloads? The latter approach offers more tangible benefits."
Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group,
said the program "should help to get students interested in software
and programming. Also, given that people don’t like to retrain, this
will be the seeds for a new generation of programmers who drive the
Microsoft platforms into the private and public sectors. Without
efforts like this Microsoft’s long-term future is less certain."
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