It's déjà vu all over again! Let's set the stage for this eerily familiar-sounding scenario, shall we? Last month, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that, in terms of sales volume, Apple was no longer king of the education hill, having been toppled by the upstart Dell. Yes, it had finally happened; according to numbers published by the Dataquest Gartner Group, Apple's sales to schools had slipped to the point where learning institutions were buying more Dells than Macs. Needless to say, it was not a pretty sight.

But hold up-- as faithful viewer Andrew was kind enough to point out, MacCentral recently published some comments by an Apple Higher Education account executive that throw Dataquest's numbers into a doubtful light. Dataquest claims that Dell captured 15.1% of the education market, while Apple ranked only a 12.5% slice of the pie, but apparently that's not the whole story. Jamie Moyer, the aforementioned account exec, claims that Dataquest's most recent numbers utterly neglect to acknowledge Apple's direct sales into that market-- which, when combined with the sales that Dataquest does count, puts Apple's overall education market share at somewhere around the 31% mark. In other words, Apple's still tops in education (unless Dataquest also forgot about a slew of Dell's sales, too).

Have you figured out why this all sounds so familiar? Well, it might be because almost the exact same thing happened about a year ago. First Dell issued a press release crowing about how it had finally toppled Apple from the education throne. The numbers it cited? Why, Dataquest's, of course. Then Apple said "hold the phone," countering with its own press release which accused Dell of neglecting to include Apple's direct sales into the calculations, which led to its premature touchdown boogie, when in fact Apple was still number one. The difference between these two scenarios? Well, the press releases themselves, we suppose, and about a year on the calendar. In other words, not freaking much.

So did Dataquest make the same mistake twice? If Jamie Moyer is right, then it sure looks that way. Tsk, tsk... a fundamental inability to learn from one's mistakes. Sounds like Dataquest's number crunchers all went to schools who bought Dells instead of Macs. Ooooooo, BURN!!