Confirming rumors that have been flying for months at various Mac web sites, Apple finally announced the Apple Store for Education. Set for an April 30th launch, the Apple Store for Education will bring the same easy build-to-order configuration options currently available for consumers to the education market. Read more about it in Apple's official announcement.

In addition to letting educational purchasers custom-configure their schools' Macs for purchase, the new Apple Store will allow them to order the systems securely online, just like the current Apple Store for consumers does. Since the pricing all reflects an educational price break, however, educational purchasers will have to be registered with the Apple Store in order to be able to buy online. One cool twist not currently available at the consumer Apple Store is the ability for schools to configure customized pages for their buyers; for instance, if a particular school district has specific recommendations for computer options, it seems that they can have special pages that will guide school buyers through those recommended options to make the build-to-order process even more efficient.

Cool! A concrete example that Apple really is committed to its core market of education. Sounds good to us. And for those of you who are students and teachers but are not authorized buyers for your school, fear not-- while this first iteration of the educational Apple Store will require you to forward your order to an authorized buyer, a personal version of the site is slated to appear later this spring, which will allow individuals the option of configuring and buying their own systems. (This, and more information, is available in an Apple Q & A.)

And Apple's new educational online store isn't the only reason that schools should celebrate. According to MacCentral, Cisco Systems is planning on donating more than 3700 Macs to some 300 public schools in the Bay Area over the next couple of years. Score! That's a lot of free computing power! Way to go, Cisco!

...At least, sort of. The reason Cisco is giving away so many Macs is because they're migrating their whole business to Windows, and they're pulling all their Macs out of service. "We were one of the largest users of Apple," says a Cisco representative-- emphasis on "were." Not a good sign for Apple's future in the corporate world. Plus, all of the donated Macs are CPU's only-- monitors and keyboards are not included. (Strange, considering that ADB keyboards won't be much use to a business who's only going to use PC's.)

Ah, well... there's a dark side to every cause for joy. Apple's corporate loss is the school system's gain.

If there was any question before about whether or not the Department of Justice was planning to extend its case against Microsoft, there now seems little doubt that the software company is the DoJ's new white whale. While the current "Redmond Justice" case stretches ever onward into the uncertain future, the DoJ keeps sniffing around Microsoft's business practices, in search of more evidence of unkosher activity. According to a ZDNet article, a "full-scale antitrust assault" may be in the works, and it may hit sooner rather than later.

Just last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee (which oversees the Justice Department) held a highly-publicized hearing that, while it didn't settle anything one way or the other, did apparently send a message to the DoJ to continue its actions against Microsoft. The DoJ is now sending out feelers to look into whether using a non-MS browser in Windows 98 would introduce any performance degradation, and they're also investigating the contracts Microsoft has arranged with web content creators to support the proprietary "Active Channel" format. The DoJ is currently trying to decide whether the next lawsuit should be targeted just at Windows 98, or at the general anticompetitive practices of Microsoft itself. Either way, they hope to file the next suit before Window 98 ships, which is expected to come out in early May, so we don't have long to wait to find out.

The other tricky decision the DoJ faces is what avenue they'll take to fix Microsoft's wagon, should they win their upcoming case. Will they break Microsoft up into lots of "BabySofts?" Or will they simply place and enforce restrictions on Microsoft's business practices? All assuming, of course, that they could win the case in the first place... Stay tuned, because it looks like the drama's just beginning...