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Missing Assignment (12/11/98)
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Uh-oh-- now there's still more evidence that Apple's got to overcome a fair bit of momentum if they really want to reverse the Windows migration in the education market. According to a MacTimes article, Apple's just lost a bid for a hefty contract with the Colorado Springs School District 11; notorious Mac-bleeders Intergraph grabbed the business instead. (Intergraph, as you probably know, has been selling Windows boxes to the Mac market for ages now, pulling customers to the Dark Side.) What's worse, Apple reportedly lost the bid on the same day as Steve Jobs' CAUSE98 keynote, where he reaffirmed Apple's commitment to the educational computer market.
The school district stated that among their primary reasons for going with Intergraph is that company's expertise in integrating multiple platforms in a seamless networked computing environment. Fair enough, but we suspect that the final decision just came down to The Great Divider: price. As cool as the iMac is, and as suitable as it is for a school lab environment, at roughly $1100 per unit in the educational market, they're expensive compared to many of the Wintel options available for schools. Our guess is, that's overshadowing a lot of factors like reliability, support costs, and stuff like that. Heck, Steve Jobs knows that-- in his CAUSE keynote, he plainly admitted that Apple is "too expensive" and that he intends to start changing that.
For an in-depth look at Apple's plans to "wade back into higher education" (and hopefully the K-12 market as well), the Chronicle of Higher Education has a pretty good article. Can Apple pull it off? Well, considering that no one ever thought that they could ever break back into the home market, either, we're going to let the future unfold.
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SceneLink (1210)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 12/11/98 episode: December 11, 1998: G4 Power Macs, new iMacs, and P1's at Macworld Expo next month? As if. Meanwhile, Apple continues to struggle to maintain its slipping hold on the education market, and if you have an iMac, why not install a floppy drive or three?...
Other scenes from that episode: 1209: Asleep at the Wheel (12/11/98) Hmmm, maybe we're not nearly as on top of things as we thought we were. After all, Robert Morgan has just posted an RFI Report over at MacWEEK vehemently denying that Apple would be shipping any G4-based Macs at next month's Macworld Expo... 1211: Flippy Floppy Madness (12/11/98) Ah, the classic iMac-inspired debate: to floppy, or not to floppy? When Apple announced a new consumer Mac that would ship without a standard floppy drive, by some reactions out there you'd think they announced that the iMac would also ship with a required human treadmill for power and the Amazing Zero-Button Mouse™...
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