Is it Goodbye Mr. Chips for Apple in Education?


Moms, Dads. School district inspectors. A vast conspiracy of the Dark Side - or just the plain ignorant - are steadily removing the Mac from education. That's the sad truth, Charles Haddad at BusinessWeek writes.

It's behavior, not pricing, which is keeping Macs out of schools, Haddad argues. Although some may dispute his statement that "PCs have little price advantage over Macs", we would certainly support it, and there's much data that validates this point.

Haddad cites Needham's Charles Wolfe, who argues "Apple is fighting a desperate battle against Windows PCs in schools." And price cuts, apparently, haven't made much of difference, as the desktop PC - and now the notebook - becomes merely another commodity.

Uniformity, too, Haddad asserts, is the lingua franca of the Model of a Modern IT Manager. No mixing of platforms. No mixing of systems. In fact, lab after lab of identikit Dells is the missive.

Decision-making - long the role of teachers - has been removed from their grasp and concentrated in the hands of inspectors, IT managers and principals under pressure to keep the budgets from bleeding red ink.

Nevertheless, despite Apple CFO Fred Anderson's recent point that Apple Ed sales have risen 5%, Haddad's outlook is relatively gloomy: "The lemmings," he says, "have won the day in education."

Analysis: We agree with much of what Haddad says, but there isn't sufficient hard data in this article to back up these conclusions. Ed shipments are numbers which PC manufacturers hold pretty close to their chests, and data-collection firms can only make reasonable guestimates. Critics of the 'Dell-is-winning-education' argument will say 'look at the installed base. That's fine, but what are they being replaced with?

And it's more than lemmings. There are four swear words Haddad doesn't use. The abbreviation is MCSE. Show me an IT manager's CV, and I'll show you a lemming. A sleeper working for the evil empire.

More seriously, has the generation which championed, evangelized the Mac-in-school disappeared? Does a 13-14-15-16-17-18-19 year old want an iBook because it's 'cool'? Or are PCs 'cooler'? Not being in that demographic, I just don't know.

Hm. Maybe Apple does need to hire Ellen Feiss on a full-time basis after all...