About Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.
The current situation has put Apple in a scenario where it’s a friend of Microsoft in education. A school who using Office 365 is not buying Chromebooks. A school who heavily relies on Office for Mac will likely not be considering G-Suite as a productivity suite. This has taken two longtime rivals (Apple and Microsoft) and made them unlikely allies in education environments.
Coffee with a pal tonight, we were chatting about tech and it became obvious to me in a flash that apple’s lack of investment in any serious cloud workflow for education is because they have decided that Microsoft can have that space … and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
— Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs) February 20, 2019
Apple, so far, has stayed out of end-user services in K–12. I’ve long argued that Apple needs to begin investing in this market. One of Tim Cook’s mantra’s is to own and control their primary technologies, and software and services in K–12 is a primary technology.
What will happen to Apple if Microsoft slowly begins to have a greater appetite for hardware sales in education? What if they release a “low-cost” Microsoft Surface Go that runs highly optimized web apps? Apple could be left on the outside with hardware.
Apple has gotten burned when it relied on software partners in the past, and it could easily happen to them again. If Apple has a desire to maintain a strong K–12 presence (and they might not), then they need to invest in software and services like they are with hardware. Leaving Google as the only end-to-end provider isn’t a smart move.
Photo by Patricia Prudente on Unsplash
