Bill Gates, Laptops and Confusion

May 27, 2009

On his visit to Spain, Bill Gates met the Spanish prime minister and didn't fail to lobby for Microsoft computers in schools. But lacking knowledge of Spanish regions led to some confusion and did not quite bring the attention he might have wanted.

Although he was officially in Madrid to reach some cooperation agreements between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Spanish government, everybody was expecting Bill Gates, who met up yesterday morning with the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to also lobby for Windows on the laptops that are expected to be given out to Spanish students in September (for the full story see here and here). And lobby he did, although things didn't go quite as expected...

By the time Gates and Zapatero had got round to the press conference, the software mogul had forgotten the name of the region where Microsoft and Co. had run the pilot educational programme and, after a brief hesitation, he ploughed ahead just saying "a region in Spain" (see video here).

Not surprisingly, El País, Spain's biggest daily newspaper, immediately mentioned Aragón in their report of the meeting. El País has a vested interest in the project as it belongs to PRISA, a great Microsoft ally (they were also in the Aragón project) and the same holding that owns Santillana, the biggest publisher of school textbooks in Spain.

But RTVE, Spain's national public TV network, announced that Gates was referring to Extremadura. Extremadura, the poorest region in Spain, is famous for its Linux-based IT educational network, that helped it shoot from the bottom of the list of computers per student, to the top (the region has one computer for every two students, while the national average is one computer for every fifteen). Several other regional sources interpreted Gates vague praise as references to their own educational programmes.

Meanwhile the news that Gates had praised the GNU/Linux experience in Extremadura had hit Meneame, the Spanish version of Digg.

Some hours later, probably alerted by the unusual amount of traffic to the piece, somebody at RTVE noticed the "mistake" and "Extremadura" was erased from the text, to be substituted by "Aragón".

Related content

  • Spanish Government to Hand Schools Over to Microsoft?

    It's not the first time Microsoft has tried to wrestle away market share from free software using shady tactics. Suddenly, Microsoft seems to have discovered that education is strategic for their enterprise and they are pouring resources into cornering the market... at least in areas where Linux has the lead.

  • Debian Conference 2009 in Spain’s Extremadura

    Debconf, the annual Debian Project Conference will be taking place in Spain’s Extremadura region 2009, as Jörg Jaspert announced on the free software project’s mailing list.

  • Microsoft Encroaching on Spanish Schools... Again

    Microsoft had lost the single Windows booting option in school computers in Spain some time ago. But now they are getting back: The Spanish Government announced in a surprising move that an agreement with Microsoft has been signed to give out laptops to primary schoolchildren next year.

  • Spanish Government Reconsiders School Laptop Project

    A widespread project to equip Spanish primary students with laptops was under attack by the free software community for being an undercover operation from Microsoft to take over the educational system in the country. Now the government is considering a kind of dual booting system.

Comments

  • Video of the prime minister

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3ID4ysprJg
  • gossip

    gossip it indeed seems to be...
  • gossip

    , ,
    this is just bullshit gossip...

    why are sparing pages for such nonsenses
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News