Platform Wars in Ed-Tech
At the recommendation of a dear friend(@jpconnolly), I am reframing and fleshing out my thoughts shared on a private listserv about the evolution of “technology” (platform services) in education in response to the Apple’s recent “Student and Teacher” focused-event on March 27th. These thoughts are wholly my own, evolved out of seven years managing a K-12 education environment, the latest chapter in a career of NFP tech management and development.
The platform wars have and always will be about market share, and conceptual/workflow lockin in the hearts and minds of future platform consumers. This has been going on since typewriters, but with far more aggressive assertion since the computer age. In the education space, Apple had the bull by the horns almost 20 years ago, only to fumble the pass to Microsoft, who doubled down on workplace productivity, eschewing education until the PC market made it reasonable for a school to make the investment.
Back in the days when we used docile pteranodons to punch holes in slates for rudimentary programs, we learned all sorts of CS content on Apple gear in the nascience of computer science. Logo, Rocky’s Boots, and Operation Frog all loomed large in my early mind. Those machines, however, were right next to Tandys and Commodores, which were really helpful in programming some new features into our Heathkit Hero Jr and Armatrons.
What happened to the future?
When students got out of school and got jobs in the late 80’s and early 90’s (outside of the creative space, which Apple dominated with the exclusive Adobe partnership), they had to learn MS office, C++ and VB dominated the programming market. This led to a feedback loop where schools converted their programs, because they wanted their students to have the relevant skills for the workplace. Apple firmly entrenched around the creative markets, clinging to the Adobe exclusive — sure you could use it on Windows, but it was always a day late and dollar short on features.
Suddenly, Prodigy and AOL let the common folk on the web us old Usenetters and BBSers had been experiencing for ages into the fun. The web took off. Desktop only mattered for applications and games. Apple doubled down on the thier exclusive software and O/S, plugging their ears about Intel’s market dominance. Wintel suddenly became _the_ place for games. Linux became enterprise, UNIX started looking long in the tooth (unless you happen to be one of these companies) and Microsoft had to uncouple the browser from the OS. Somewhere in there MS bailed out Apple to prevent a potential antitrust suit, and the Adobe exclusive with Apple dissolved, gradually reaching platform parity by the early aughts. Database products became overwhelmingly open source, aside from monolithic institutions (MSSql, Oracle, or Filemaker, as institutional expertise shook out).
After the ill-fated candy-Mac debacle, Apple decided to get serious about making luxury goods out of tools, starting with the ipod. This led into new ithings, and a resurgence of MacOS on the workstation side, while Apple wrapped subpar gear in sexy shells and sold them at 400% markup. The whole time, MS had their heads pretty firmly up their asses, (until Server 2012/Windows 8 at least). Palm, which had smartphones figured out years before Apple had an ipod, died a grisly death, and virtualization and cloud started becoming real concepts, as opposed to Asimov sheep dreams. Blackberry, the first real market contender the Iphone had to fight with, ended up in the rubbish heap with Palm, Qualcomm, and (some might argue) Nokia.
Around 15 years ago, Google started offering NFP institutions (including schools) free gapps access. At that time, neither MS or Apple wanted to hear anything about cloud services, low-cost of entry and learning annual subscriptions, or production beta software platforms. Their general stance was: “we still want to sell our software on fixed hardware licenses ::stick fingers in ears:: na na na na na”
MS was offering discounted licenses on their enterprise-priced solutions. Apple was still selling enterprise luxury goods at a 1–2% discount.
Let that sink in for a second.
Based on current industry analysis, Google currently has a good hold on over 60% of the market (1, 2). That is considering the first Chromebooks, which were kinda crap, only hit the market seven years ago, and have already iterated into a plethora of affordable, reliable, durable options.
Google only formally decided to get into education, three years ago, when it launched Classroom. It had played around with it for a year before launch in live-fire field tests. The school I work for was one of them.
Apple, MS, and innumerable web platforms have been trying to establish market dominance in the hearts and minds of education users since Funky Cold Medina was at the top of the charts. Google has been at it less than a decade, and they have more than 60% of the market. When everyone else wanted gated licensed platforms, Google wanted open, multi-user, real time collaboration. By the time Office 365 got around to it, Google had it spit polished to a pretty solid shine. Apple went another route, and made dumbed down suite offerings, that work very similarly on an ithing and a desktop.
I’m not a proponent of monopoly or monolithic solutions. Quite the opposite, I prefer an agile open market where platforms are constantly killing each other off, and having cannibal feasts of improvement and innovation on the corpses of their predecessors. For a userbase who loves a certain featureset, it is an opportunity for an open source product to fill the gap (theoldreader anyone?). For those who don’t want to become tomorrow’s dinner, they have to keep pushing forward, because they are constantly being tailed by a horde armed with forks and knives.
Why not use all the platforms? Pick the best of each flavor, and factor them out to the appropriate situations? Teachers have enough on their plates, and as has been discussed (and will be discussed more) in conversations about the evolution of the role of a Technology Director. Our time to manage a stable full of rabid cats of hardware, security, software, end-user, printer, network, emerging tech, website, internet, and strategic planning/due diligence has been shaved down to nil.
If I’m looking for a solution I want in the hands of students and teachers, I want it to succeed, because you don’t always get another at-bat. I want to get tech into the hands of students and teachers that _works_ with minimal intervention, no babysitting, and self-service professional development. Something that easily translates coursework to techwork and back, and might even (occasionally) offer a time savings in addition to an enhanced learning environment.
Google has been doing that for a couple years, and they blow away whatever else is out there, full stop. The recent convergence with the Chrome/Android spaces add even more value to the platform, and everyone else is playing catch up or a denial game.
If Apple was serious about competing, they would be working to innovate platform ease of use (particularly on the enterprise management side), multi-user collaborative platform tools, cheap simple-to-use hardware, and actual cuts for educational institutions. What they are doing (and what they have been doing since captain black turtleneck died) is promoting on brand loyalty and luxury product desire, as opposed to real innovation, which is where I think a lot of the groans in our community come from.
I don’t have to deal with it, but my heart really bled reading recent discussions about Mac desktop imaging in a post Sierra world, and the hijinks you have to go through to field a friggin workstation. From my experience, the number of hoops one has to go through to “correctly” manage a fleet of ithings is even worse — I don’t have the time to invest to find out in person, despite us having 30-something ithings floating around in carts.
What happened to the future is that it got stuck in a 20-year cul-de-sac, and someone else had to come in and build a connector road with traffic going in another direction for things to actually start moving.
