By now we're all pretty used to reports of shrinking market share, right? It is, after all, just part of being a Mac user in the late 90's. The most recent numbers, however are a mite troubling; they indicate that Apple's piece of the education pie, traditionally a stronghold and one of their two "core markets," is dwindling at what can only be described as an alarming rate. A Bloomberg News article breaks the bad news.

Apparently Apple had 61% of the educational market in 1993, but by 1996 that had fallen to about 41%. That's still not bad, but last year it plummetted to 26.8%. Chalk it up to the swirling uncertainty about Apple's future that stemmed from its huge losses over the last couple of years, as well as the gap in pricing between Macs and comparable Wintel systems (if indeed a Wintel system is ever truly comparable to a Mac). Remember a few years ago when a Wintel system was unequivocally much cheaper than a Mac? Unfortunately, while Apple's made fantastic strides in making its midrange systems even less expensive than many brand-name Wintels, at the low end it's just the same old story. And we're willing to bet that most educational purchasers have one paramount directive: Buy as many systems as possible with this amount of money. (Note that repair, upkeep, and training costs are often ignored when this decision is made, regardless of how shortsighted that may be.)

Hindsight is 20/20 vision, of course, but we at AtAT are starting to think that Apple should have "retreated" to targeting its core markets of education and content creation a little earlier. To see that they lost a fifth of the educational market share from 1993 to 1996 implies that they just weren't paying attention. And reversing the trend in the schools now will be an uphill battle, especially with Intel and Microsoft teaming up to give colleges "migration grants" of millions of dollars in NT systems (remember the Yale scandal?) and Wintel manufacturers like Dell and Compaq aggressively selling cheap machines that Apple simply still can't match in price. Here's hoping that the upcoming Mac NC's and the low-cost G3-based Artemis will provide suitable ammunition to continue the fight.