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Microsoft Losing the School Markets To iPads and Chromebooks
dkatana writes Microsoft's licensing scheme, the high cost of support and difficult management of devices are the key factors making schools drop Windows for better alternatives as iPads and Chromebooks. Google is making a dent in the education market with Chromebooks. The internet giant has been promoting the use of Chrome OS with specific tools for schools to manage the devices, their apps and users. Its Chromebooks for Education program is helping schools deploy large numbers of devices with an easy management system. While Google is successful with Chromebooks as school laptops the clear winner on tablets is Apple. iPads are a the preferred platform for schools deploying tablets as digital learning devices.
This is what should happen everywhere...
http://www.linux.com/news/feat...
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Here here. I'm not a fan of either MS or Apple but I'm even less of a fan computers in the classroom. Computers do have their place for research and writing papers but I just don't think they need to be used every day in the classroom.
Now I may be an old fuddy-duddy, but I still haven't seen conclusive evidence that they make learning any easier or better.
But that's only my 2 cents.
I've seen studies that have shown that they interfere with learning, but none that showed they improved learning.
Warning, anecdotal evidence ahead:
I regularly volunteer at my kids school, and have worked with their "special needs" kids, including several autistic students. These are kids that have difficulty with human interaction, and don't do well in a regular classroom. But they seem to interact well with tablets, and there are some apps that are specifically tailored to autistic kids. So tablets do seem to have a niche. But for "normal" kids, I agree that tablets are a distraction and a waste of resources.
Years ago there were two motorcycles that showed up at my local Honda motorcycle dealer. One was the Pacific Coast and I forget the name of the other. The PC was a combination of a racing bike and a touring bike like a goldwing; while the other was a combination of a racing bike and a Harley Davidson. I really wanted a PC as it actually met my unusual needs at the time really nicely but couldn't afford it. But around 3 years went by and the dealership hadn't sold a single one. So they discounted them heavily and sold a few. The rest just sat for around 2 more years and then Honda kicked in for them to do a massive discount. I missed out on the deal but the end result was that they sold the PC for a really good price but basically gave away the other one. My brother managed to buy one for around $1600 when the original price was around $5,000.
Basically while both bikes were perfectly good people either wanted a touring bike or a sport bike; and in the second case wanted a sport bike or a Harley like bike.
Over the years I have seen similar products arrive with much hype but then sort of wither away and die. Go to any hardware store and someone has combined an Axe and something else. Or a screwdriver with a flashlight. Yet go back a year later and these sorts of products are gone only to be replaced with another bunch of doomed combo products. Once in a blue moon something like the Swiss army knife comes along that does combine things well but again it doesn't really replace a good kitchen knife, good scissors, or a good screwdriver it thrives on its portability and the fact that you get so many tools for a fairly low price.
Then there all kinds of similar failures like the El Camino. Basically it won the hearts of movie Latino gangsters and that is about it. Or all those promotional office supplies that try to shoehorn a calculator in. Binders, pens, etc. I don't think I ever did a single calculation on a promotional calculator integrated into some office supply. And sometimes there are those products that won't die. All in one printers. For most people those things just suck. Their drivers ruin machines, none of the features are that good and most people just end up using them as printers. Or TV DVD/VCR players... junk.
The surface is a perfect example of one of these compromise combos. It is a laptop, that is a tablet, that runs windows, that costs a pile of money. When I use my tablet I use it for tablet stuff like playing simple games, surfing the web for specific information, watching videos, but not for programming, writing books, or anything that it would do terribly. But my laptop literally has no games and I don't even watch many videos on it, it is purely for work when I am on the go.
Last Christmas I tried to buy a Chromebook for my mother in law because she needs a lightweight (powerwise) laptop that she can't screw up. She primarily needs it for email. There were a bunch around $250 which would have been perfect had they not been all out of stock. So basically I was viewing the chromebook as a really cheap underpowered laptop; but still a laptop.
So when looking at the surface I just don't see where it fits into a need that customers have. If they need a laptop there are plenty of laptops that are far cheaper than the surface that are only a little bigger. If they want a tablet there are far better tablets for far less money. If they need a powerful laptop then again there are far better laptops for far less money. In fact a good laptop and a good tablet will cost less than a surface.
But then there is a whole other reality. Most people don't really need a laptop or desktop any more. I suspect that this does not apply to most slashdotters but out in the wild most people create very little content and barely need a keyboard; hence the huge demand for large tablet like phones as these are often people's primary interface to the internet. But if they do need to type a bit more than the average bear then they can get an older used laptop or a chr
With a network of hundreds of tablets that need to be locked down, managed, protected against malware, needing to access content etc. you'd better want them to join a Windows domain. The free Windows version won't allow that.
I think the idea sucks anyway whatever the OS is. A tablet has less display estate than A4 paper and an open book. Bright screen stealing attention is especially worrying. Wifi is a nightmare, but a USB plug on each desk that gives wired ethernet access could remedy that.
Moving, overbright (with bad black levels) crap don't believe in a classroom. Give the kids something with a keyboard and a monochrome LCD.
Schools pay less than corporate customers; but (at least when I was doing IT for a school district) there was still a significant gap between 'less than corporate' and 'what our budget could absorb without pain'.
Yes, for certain consumer/BYOD scenarios, on rather crippled devices, MS has succumbed to the inevitable and cut prices to the bone. However, if you still want things like 'laptops with keyboards' or 'Active Directory for credentials handling and some semblance of management', it's a punch in the wallet. More so if you go for a full Office/Exchange setup, and if you need to go into System Center, or a third party equivalent (Altiris used to kick ass; but Symantec purchased it and has been ruining it lately) for imaging and more robust control than pure AD.
MS doesn't have the pricing power of Big Blue in the Days of Yore; but even with educational discounts it adds up uncomfortably fast.
Chromebooks are, admittedly, rather limited; but chromeOS + Apps for Education can do credentials, a fair amount of configuration, and get students typing away impressively quickly and cheaply compared to the alternatives. There are things you simply can't do, full stop; but within their scope those things are damned efficient.
iPads are slick, and have all the 'apps' and iBook-only textbooks and similar stuff; but management might as well have been designed to remind you that Apple hates enterprise and institutional customers. They aren't as bad as they used to be; but even with a full MDM setup, it's a massive pain in the ass(Though, while chromeOS is absurdly better, Android is even worse).
Actual OSX devices are much better behaved, as are Windows systems with enough licenses in place for a full AD setup; but the hardware is either more expensive or less portable and doesn't offer the exciting finger-painting action that users crave for some stupid reason.
I'll weigh in on two different thoughts.
First thought: iPads vs. Chromebooks vs. Microsoft. At a recent technology director's conference, there's nothing but moaning & groaning about managing iPads. It's four year's running now, and Apple just does not get Enterprise management. No central management of Apple IDs, App management is terrible (Apple Configurator is lousy, buggy, and doesn't push apps, and 3rd party management tools keep breaking w/ every new version of iOS), the list keeps going on. And there's nothing but good things being said about Chromebooks. Affordable, simple, easy enterprise management, no more need for file servers...the only criticism is that they eat bandwidth. And Microsoft? Yesterday's news.
Second thought: regarding the criticisms about 1-1 and flooding schools with digital devices. I in much part agree that there's not a direct -need- for student digital devices. But digital devices do enhance learning by providing greater opportunities to communicate, manage classroom content digitally and make it accessible outside school, create video lessons and "flip" the classroom, and provide formative assessments (i.e. frequent quizzing that is used to guide instruction & provide mnemonic enhancement) that have been proven to be a very effective learning tool. But these are all -instructional- changes that need to start and continue with the teacher. It's foolish for a district to follow a blind "build-it-and-they-will-come" strategy of flooding a school with digital devices and utterly failing at supporting instructional changes. If districts aren't willing to provide both continual funding for a 1-1 program as well as instructional support to teachers, then they're wasting their money. But we all need to recognize that schools are responsible for teaching students how to effectively use the internet in the pursuit of knowledge. The internet is the new information paradigm of our society, making it a necessary part of the curriculum.
Economics fail: analysis of probabilistic expenses need to factor in the probability of occurrence. Expected cost = (multi-thousand dollars in medical costs) * (near-zero odds of such an accident occurring) $600. And don't forget the alternate risks of mugging you're subjecting children to by having them carry around a $600 thief-magnet rather than some books nobody wants.
And your use case may sound good, but we all know what will usually happen is that most students will spend their time chatting online, playing video games, etc. and get less out of the experience than if they had no supplies at all. And what's wrong with carrying a paper and pencil and an applicable textbook? Much cheaper when inevitably lost or destroyed, and they'll even get a bit more exercise in the bargain, and lord only knows they probably need it.
There may be a niche for integrating computers computers into general education for normal children, but it would probably have to be a purpose-built machine: everything I've seen to date is worse than useless for the purpose.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Chromebooks ... There are things you simply can't do, full stop
As a school oriented laptop that is probably a plus. Email, browser, google docs, ... plus the education focused classroom stuff ... that sounds highly capable. Being "locked down" doesn't seem like a negative here, probably solves more problems than it creates.
Having worked for a school district, I can tell you that licensing was a major issue but, not for the reasons that most people think. It has nothing to do with cost even though the licenses were pricy. The problem was the technical solutions that Microsoft instituted to try and enforce their licensing that was the issue. We either had to do limited activation licences that were use and loose which is a major problem when you're doing network imaging as you burn through the licences like they're tissue paper or you had to run clunky and unreliable "activation servers" with severe technical limitations and were even more problematic with people with laptops. In the end, we had to do a hybrid solution on both methods to try and keep our copies of Windows and Office activated and even then it wasn't 100% effective. We were looking for ANY alternative to this nightmare that we could make work; even if it wasn't ideal.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
USB-wired Ethernet means reverse tethering. Unfortunately, it really isn't practical on a classroom scale, because of the distances involved, not to mention that general-purpose computers aren't really all that great at handling high-speed network routing for thirty or forty machines to begin with, and USB's excessive CPU overhead just piles on top of that.
It would be cheaper and more reliable to install a dedicated Wi-Fi hot spot in every classroom with a fairly directional antenna on the ceiling, and set the maximum transmit power really low so each classroom acts like its own microcell that is roughly limited to the bounds of the room. Chances are, a single shared Wi-Fi connection is plenty fast enough for a single classroom, and in my experience, as long as you aren't doing tethering, Wi-FI works very well on iOS (the recent WPA2 Enterprise networking authentication changes in iOS 8 notwithstanding). It's only a nightmare on Windows, which is probably one of the reasons that Microsoft is getting stomped into the ground in school markets.... But I digress.
BTW, does anybody else find it odd for an article to say that MS is losing the market? Normally "-ing" verbs imply that something is happening right now. I was under the impression that they had pretty much lost the K-12 market to iPads years ago.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I work in a school. We've been through the whole "every pupil gets a computer" phase and it was a disaster - we used eeepcs running Xandros and initially there were complaints about how crummy the programs were. (IE people expected Office, but they got OpenOffice instead).
Then after a few days the breakages started - minibooks left in bags, being dropped, screens smashed, drinks spilt on them etc. So that meant that teachers couldn't rely on everyone having one any more and the whole point of them was lost. They stopped being used and we ended up getting about 30% of them back after the year was out, the rest were damaged or lost. It was an absolute waste of money and it still goes on with other schools today (those who are foolish enough to give tablets to all their pupils, anyway!)
We still use desktop PCs running Windows and Office, as it's what the real world uses (for now, at least). We provide access via UAG to our network for staff and pupils to access their documents remotely.
Google Docs, OneDrive etc are blocked for pupils. Chromebooks are pointless from our point of view due to Google Docs being blocked and lack of intergration into a Windows domain. They also don't run the programs which pupils use in school (which include some digital textbooks, additional educational needs programs, maths programs, Photoshop etc). iPads are beyond useless for our needs, as it's a faff to create spreadsheets or word process on them. Yes, it can be done, but a real keyboard and a decent PC make it much more pleasant.
So, like most schools around this part of the UK, we have several IT rooms with desktops. We have a media suite running Premiere (having phased out Macs a few years ago), a music suite running Cubase and a DT suite running SolidWorks. We have a couple of hundred staff laptops and a couple of hundred curriculum laptops, safely locked away at night.
We are looking at at BYOD implementation, but the powers that be aren't overly keen to have teenagers running around with expensive laptops, tablets etc. And there's the whole network file access issue, we can't add the machines to the domain so they'd have to go through the somewhat clunky UAG system to access their files. There's also the line of who has responsibility to ensure the machines accessing our network are patched and up-to-date, as we don't have the resources to look after people's personal equipment.
All in all, there won't be much change in the school where I work for the foreseeable future: Office and Windows look like remaining the main platform for a while yet. It's the same in the other schools in the area, Chromebooks and the like are simply not useful to the way that schools work around here.
Too little, too late - especially with such a crapfest OS that continues to use the biggest piece of shit interface since people wrote with dried manure.
Look, I'm no fan of Android, but it's not THAT bad.
Required reading for internet skeptics
well if you don't want them stealing your kids iPad, buy them Microsoft Surfaces instead. Problem solved.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!