Our Take on Apple in Education

As we all know Dell has targeted the education market and has been making serious inroads into a market once dominated by Apple. While Dell may lead Apple in overall education market share, Apple still claims the lead in laptop computers and has just produced a killer education laptop, the new iBook, at the peak of education buying for the fall school year. Apple has hired a new vice president for education, brought education marketing in house and bought the top education software. So Apple has become serious about education as CEO Steve Jobs promised but is it enough?

Steve Wood took Apple to task in his latest column because the new iBook is, in his opinion, priced too high to win the day in education. Of course, there are no other laptops that I know of that come close to the iBook's features for education at a similar price. Steve wrote me partly in jest that half the respondents wanted to shoot him and the other half wanted to hang him.

Price is a primary consideration in government contracting but not the only consideration. As an example, the Montgomery County Public Schools (MD) CFO--that's right, not the CIO--in responding to my questions about their dropping of Macs in favor of PCs wrote that Dell had bid $851 while Apple had bid $999 on the first wave of their contracts to standardize on PCs, so they went with Dell. At the time Apple sold a $799 iMac at full retail so what's wrong with this picture? It's called the fine art of specification writing. It's one of the principal reasons why you can see so many Dells or other name-brand PCs in government offices rather than eMachines or no-name PC clones that integrators can provide more cheaply. In other words, if one is skillful enough in writing the specifications one can pretty much dictate what one gets despite procurement laws specifically designed to prevent this. We've asked MCPS for their specifications to see how they did it.

Who writes the contract specifications? The staff of an IT department or the CIO does, of course. While contract officers or buyers may question specifications or ask for a justification, they are frequently easily bluffed by IT people. The CIO of MCPS announced that he was replacing Macs with PCs before the contract bid was tendered and that's what he got. No surprise here. Apple, with it's purposefully small number of computer models, is a sitting duck for those who do not want to give Apple a chance via the specifications method.

Why on earth would an IT department or CIO in an educational institution want to write out Apple, especially if teachers, students and parents are clamoring to retain Macs in schools for educational and classroom efficiency reasons? Arrogance, ignorance and greed are some of the motivations that come to mind. Ask yourself how well public schools pay when compared with the enterprise market. What IT technology monopolizes the enterprise market where the big paying jobs are? Now, certainly not all IT people in educational institutions are so self-serving that they put their interests above those of teachers and students but there are enough that may to make the educational road a tough one for Apple.

So what is Apple to do? One possibility is for Apple to produce targeted educational models that are difficult to spec out given Dell is the competition. The new iBook does that for laptops. The iMac is an easy target even though many found their way into education. Take the new iBook, remove the LCD screen, trackpad and keyboard, add an external keyboard and mouse and Apple would have a killer of a slim little education desktop box that could be used with any size inexpensive CRT for less than the Dell boxes.

The other thing is School Board education as noted by Charles Haddad in his BusinessWeek article. This includes making the effort to challenge bogus specifications where large purchases are at stake. Apple must have done the latter to become an authorized vendor in a Michigan education program last year since some of the original technical specifications precluded the iBooks that Apple was finally allowed to offer.

Finally, as I mentioned to Steve Wood, teachers need to take back control of their classroom and teaching tools and not allow IT departments to dictate what tools they use, at least not without securing a meaningful involvement in the decision.

Comments are welcome.