Stephen Pair <spair at advantive.com>, replied to my note about my
government wasting a lot of money (for a country of about 4 million people)
on Microsoft software for schools, saying

	That really is an unfortunate waste of money.  I fail to see why
	anyone would spend any money on an operating system these days.
	Perhaps your government officials were seeking a few perks from
	the executives in Redmond?  Just a guess.
	
I forgot who said "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately
explained by stupidity", but it seems apposite.  This Government has
a lot of fairly inexperienced members of parliament.  I see no reason
to believe that anyone in charge would know a sound technical decision
if it bit them in the leg.  On the other hand, it would not surprise me
if Microsoft's salesmen knew their job very well, and could make a sale
to someone who had never ever heard of Linux, MacOS, StarOffice, or indeed
open source.

And I think that's the real point.  Smalltalk can do anything that Java can
do, and do it better, but more people have _heard_ of Java than of Smalltalk.
You don't need corruption to explain why a company would "choose" Java
rather than Smalltalk without doing any comparitive evaluation; you only
need to suppose that they did not know they were making a choice.

Same with Windows:  you only have to suppose that the people responsible
for the choice were sufficiently incompetent not to have realised that
"computers in schools" does not mean the same as "Wintel boxes in schools"
and the choice was done without any actual choice being made.

The sad thing is that I'd have to vote for these clowns again because there
isn't any better alternative.