Apple's higher education challenge

A couple of posts yesterday tweaked my interest in how Apple is doing in the higher education market.  The first came from damonparker.org, "Apple in the Enterprise? v2."  In it Damon asks the question when referring to some of Apple's campus efforts, "Will it be enough to secure Apple’s future in the enterprise? 

The other post which caught my attention was over at Geek Speak at MaineToday.com , by Gerard Hickey. His enthusiasm for OS X after returning from Apple's Canadian Summer Camp for technical people had sparked a comment, "The problem is not Tiger but Apple itself," and referred people back to my previous post, "Continuing pressure on Mac users."

So the question is, how is Apple doing in higher education and what is the prospect for the future?  Will Apple's efforts and successes in higher education help them in the enterprise?

This morning I went back and read Damon's original post on Apple and his experience at UT Austin.  That post had a link to a post, "Apple Looks to Get Back Domination of College Market"  which looks so optimistic that I first thought it had been written by Apple's PR department.

There's one quote from IDC which shows how easy it is to use statics to come up with backing for whatever argument you're trying to prove.

IDC said 75 percent of all student computer purchases are now laptops and that Apple's share of the educational laptop market rose to 27 percent late last year, a gain of nearly 5 percentage points in less than a year.

That's sounds really positive.  However, to really understand where Apple stands in the higher education market, you first need to understand how the higher education market has changed.

First there is little doubt that Apple is doing better in the higher education market, but certainly not as well overall as the folks from Mac News World would have us believe.

There were two things which drove Apple's success back in the day's when Damon's UT Austin was almost all Mac.  The first was a recommendation that students buy Macs and low prices which made that purchase attractive for students to do it on campus.  The second was a sound connection between the university administrative desktop, the academic desktop, and the Macintosh.

While IDC's numbers are likely correct and validate what I'm hearing about students who buy on campus, they don't take into account the huge percentage of students who no longer buy on campus, and who have had computers all through high school.  Purchasing a computer on campus is often done now mostly by parents who are a little worried about their kids needing an extra level of support.  The prices are not very different than what you can find off campus, and anyone can tell you that Apple appears to be losing the K-12 battle so more students are using Windows systems during their high school years.  My guess is that far more of those students who buy off campus are still hauling Windows machines to campus, sometimes the ones the parents no longer want.

When I was running one of Apple's very successful mid-nineties higher education teams, the absolute goal was to get a letter from the campus recommending the purchase of a Mac and create a bundle that would be hard to duplicate off campus.  We knew from experience that buying off campus likely meant the student would end up with a Windows box.

Those were the days that Dartmouth required Macintosh purchase of all students.  Not only did Apple provide special pricing, but Apple also often invested with the universities in new projects that either drove academic or even administrative computing.  It was a great partnership between Apple and higher education.  Around 1996 Apple reorganized its higher education division almost out of existence.  Many of the key people who had driven these great relationships ended up at Dell or Compaq.  I ended up selling to business and government customers as Apple decided that Duke, UNC, Penn State, University of Virginia, Maryland, George Washington, Georgetown, Virginia Tech, NC State, and other mid-Atlantic schools would be better served by coverage from a manager located in Texas as opposed to one in close geographic proximity like my Virginia location.

Higher education is a very relationship oriented business, and Apple has never recovered from breaking these relationships and sending many of their experienced higher education folks to the competition.  Some higher Apple education folks survived but mostly as second class citizens in an Education Division instead of a Higher Education Division. Then to add insult to injury, the brilliant decision was made to combine higher education teams with K-12 teams on a local level.  This often meant that management had even less of a clue as to what needed to be done to rebuild those higher education relationships.

This was all happening while there was very good news on the product front with OS X.  The reality is that Apple's higher education student business has grown substantially recently but I'm certain it has never returned to the exceptional numbers that were common in the early nineties.

Of course Apple current education management's great reluctance to get out of Cupertino and build those higher education relationships hasn't helped.  Coming to the ivory towers of Cupertino isn't what it used to be in the nineties. 

While many of the universities went to Apple to try to negotiate iTunes Music store agreements for their students, Apple basically ignored them.  I'm guessing that Apple's success with the iPod would have been even greater if they could have figured out how to help out the college administrators like Napster did as indicated in this USA Today article, "More schools offer cheap music downloads for students."  While these agreements certainly didn't turn the tide against the iPod, not working with the universities didn't do anything for Apple's higher education business or relationships. How the deals iTunes deals talked about in the Mac News World article compare to the Napster ones, is something I don't know.  I do know that I received two e-mails from high level higher education people expressing dismay at Apple's inability to really work with them on the issue.

Just to check and see if I'm on the right track, I did a number of Google searches on "recommended purchases xxxx college." First I did Dartmouth which was the gold standard in the nineties.  Students there can still buy Macs, but it you check this page, things don't look good for administrative users.

Most administrative departments have enrolled in the Hardware and Software Standards Program. This program provides new Dell computers to staff on a regular basis. If your work requires the use of an Apple computer, please contact your computer support person before making a purchase.

It looks like the standard enterprise IT control situation.  Next I went to Franklin and Marshall which was the small school version of Dartmouth.  Things still look positive at F&M since it appears Macs are still recommended. 

About 80% of current students have followed the College's recommendation to have personal access to an Apple Macintosh. All of the College's approximately 160 full-time faculty have Macintoshes in their offices.

The 80% number is less than the nearly 100% Macintosh number that we used to see there.  I then checked out Duke and found that Macs are still on the list.  However, I was stunned to see the computer listing for their labs where Linux seems to be a growing presence.  I then checked out Sweet Briar College which used be one of Apple's great small college customers.  I found these statements on SBC's recommendations page.

Should I purchase a Apple computer?
Apple computers have a well deserved reputation for innovation, quality and ease of use. Apple has renewed its support for Higher Education, and the iBook & iMac are great student computers. Macs are powerful multimedia computers which are especially good for web design, graphic design, and video editing. All Macs have the capability to interact with the Windows world. At SBC it is OK to "Think Different."

Should I purchase a Dell computer?
Dell is ranked as the number one PC company. More than 90% of all the desktop computers in the world run under Microsoft Windows. It is the computer most used in business. Also, there are more programs for the Windows platform. Buying a Dell or an Apple all depends on your personal choice.

A check on Penn State's Computer page indicated Macs are okay for students but interestingly when I went to check their labs, I couldn't get the search for Macs to work.  It could have been a browser issue or a security precaution for their labs since my IP address is definitely not on campus.

After PSU, I checked out a small state school here in Virginia, Longwood.   They still have a Dell requirement in place.

I also checked the University of Michigan site and found these recommendations.

Both PCs and Macs are used throughout the University. The decision to purchase either one should be based on what you are most comfortable with and a careful consideration of price and functionality (including what you'll use it for besides word processing and e-mail). You may also want to check with your academic advisor to learn more about which types of computers and software are used in your field of study.

Then I checked out Harvard, my Alma mater.  Harvard was at one time Apple's largest higher education customer.  Students can still use Macs, but the killer is on the administrative desktop.  This Harvard page is unfortunately not unique in the university world and very indicative of the real problem that Apple faces across higher education.  Even scarier is that many of the Harvard administrative solutions actually exclude specifically OS X.

Apple has lost the administrative desktop and that makes it that much harder to retain the academic desktop since many university people have their feet in both worlds.

At a time when Apple has chosen to sit on its $6B plus cash horde, I would be willing to bet that Microsoft is continuing to invest boat loads of cash in higher education.  A quick search turns up this on MS's site.

Microsoft Research’s engagement with universities spans a wide variety of activities. These include an annual Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington, regular requests for proposals and numerous funding awards supporting research and curriculum development, along with training and technical support for researchers funded by our grant programs. The University Relations program is a regular sponsor of more than a dozen important academic conferences and professional organizations every year. And through the New Faculty Fellowship program, University Relations supports early-career faculty of outstanding promise.

Of course one of the biggest things driving universities these days is research funding.  Microsoft is pretty clear about the areas they're researching on this page.  Even more importantly the first thing on the MS education page is an enticing suggestion to "Build a Web portal that clicks with faculty and students."

My guess is that one of those MS web portals just might lock you into MS products.  Of course that will no longer be a problem since you can run Windows on your Mac in the future.

Apple has some nice profiles of academic success on their Higher Education site but when I went to their "Administrative Computing" page, I begin to get the feeling that there are no examples of success in higher education which use Macs in administrative computing.

In fact I'm not even sure that Apple's current higher education team or at least the ones doing the web page even understand what administrative computing is.  Then again, perhaps that is the problem.

There are lots of positive things happening for Apple in higher education, more students that buy on campus are choosing Macs.  Many things are moving to being browser based. If universities are better at accommodating a variety of platforms and not getting stuck in the proprietary MS world, Mac carrying students should find a comfortable home on most campuses that don't require Windows.

The things that aren't going in Apple's favor are the continuing downward spiral in hardware prices.  Toshiba laptops after rebates this year were under $500, and Linux systems appear to also be more acceptable on campus.

The real challenge continues to be Apple and its unwillingness to really partner with enterprise customers to make certain that the back end systems that administrators use on a daily basis also work with Macs.  That involves closer partnerships with enterprise vendors than Apple has been able to establish.  The pressure to change that has to come from the customers.  With most customers already having moved to Windows, the battle has already been lost and just might be hard to open again, but Apple should know that and work to change it.

You can't be as successful as Apple once was in higher education until administrative computing gets off the Windows bandwagon.  The finance and IT people in large business are a similar challenge.

Apple's current strategy is to establish credibility through their Xserve and RAID storage options. They've made some progress like getting Oracle over.  The unfortunate thing for Apple is that it isn't a simple application that can turn the tide, it's a wealth of customized solutions and people doing those solutions and support. There are a lot of MCSEs out there whose livelihood depends on Windows staying predominant.

Probably the best hope for Apple is that Linux will be more successful in the back offices and that it will drive open standards as opposed to proprietary standards.  The Xserve, remarkable product that it is, once offered a very viable option for data centers.  Now that its future is clouded with a processor switch, I'm not certain that I can be as optimistic as Gerard Hickey in his Mainetoday post on his experience at Apple's Summer Camp.

Mac OS X Tiger is so far out in front of Windows, that there is no way that Longhorn can match the features and flexibility that business needs...

You know that 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 machine you just bought? You are getting only about 50% of the performance because of the additional software you need to protect yourself. It is just a terrible waste of a good processor.

Unfortunately for Apple and MS, I have that Pentium 4  and it works just fine using Linux without a bunch of security software. Oh and all my software is free. The good news is that Linux users are still a very small minority and that I don't believe managing music (which is important to college students) is as simple as it is on a Mac.  Then again the recent Linux success in K-12 education in Indiana is just another front that Apple must worry about these days. See my post  "Linux & Apple's Education Market" for more info on that.

I should send Gerard a note and see if the new found respectability for the Pentium processors is based on anything besides Apple's presentation slides.  How quickly the definition of a good processor architecture changes in the world of Apple.

So there's good new news and sobering news for Apple in higher education. However, I doubt that Apple's foray into the enterprise is going to draw much support from higher education because the same problems that have stymied them in business are just as unresolved and entrenched in higher education.

Comments

[Stephen]

Hmm....Apple Education:

- Gets to fly customers at Apple's expense out to Cupertino for 2 day Executive Briefings.
- Fails to make numbers, yet still got award trips to the Caribbean, where no other division in Apple did.
- Gets really cool software that would be useful in the Enterprise, like Universal Locker, but is not available to anyone else within Apple.

[Ocracokewaves]

"Apple Education" in a sense doesn't deserve the Higher Education success that they're seeing. The success certainly has little to do with the HE has been managed. I think the challenge has been that the k-12 part has been the favored child while the Higher Ed folks haven't been given the support they need at a time when they could really do well.

[Anthony Hess]

Actually something I think that is helping Apple in getting sales to students in HiEd *is* their loss of K12 and the low home market penetration.

Seem crazy? Well, when the competition isn't very good without a proper support structure in place it makes people want to try something else. So all those 5000 PC to one tech guy school districts only help Apple because of the constant problems keeping the Wintels running. The home PCs that don't run because of spyware don't hurt either. Now, in a corporation where you have proper IT support this doesn't happen (much) - but these kids aren't seeing that by the time they are going into college. All they know is that they love their iPod, so they might as well get a computer to go with it.