Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
It's sensible to move with the industry standard, unless you have really good reasons not to. Would you install an Acorn Econet system when Ethernet was becoming ubiquitous?
The reality was that different "industries" had different "standards". The reality was more complex.
At one time the RISC OS machines and software dominated in UK education. The change came when Thatcher decided to introduce school boards which allowed local traders to decide what was chosen. Many of them sold Windows or Apple kit. And sold most of them to office-type businesses. So they argued that schoolkids needed 'training' in what they would use when they worked in an office. A side-benefit being they could sell more themselves and boost their income from the school.
The result was the beginning of the drift from genuine IT and computing in schools towards 'training to use Word/Excel/etc'. Most of the *educators* objected, but were over-ruled. The result was fine in terms of locking office workers into being trained to use Word/Excel but a problem for genuine *education* in computing and other areas!
It didn't help many other areas of work. For example, many of the underwater drones made for work in the North Sea were based on things like modified RiscPCs. Many other 'magic boxes' people have used, and still do, actually ran a cutdown version of RO. Everything from set-top boxes for TV to those underwater drones. As *industries* the switch to your "industry standard" (singular) didn't help them.
So please avoid the myth that there has only ever been one "industry" with any "standard". Also credit students with more sense, they were easily able to switch platform or GUi once they had been educated - as distinct from trained to use Word/Excel. Just that they often found they didn't think much of Windows!