The Last Word: Education for all

OPINION: Can’t help but notice the way the mega-vendors shoehorn their way into every aspect of society, and don’t seem happy until one or more of their gadgets are in every room of every house on the planet.

Now this is not a bad thing for a humble reseller, since all those gadgets have to come from somewhere and it might as well be here. But we’ve never had much success in one particular market niche. I’m talking about education.

Surely the old adage — get ’em while they’re young — still applies. Which Bank used to be on a winner by giving every kiddie a bank account as soon as they could do their sums and deliver newspapers.

Now of course the bean-counters have taken over the asylum, and idle bank accounts with kiddies’ pennies must be sacrificed to the gods of greed and the braying shareholders. Apple tried it with computers, with discounted kit and all sorts of research handouts to educators who supported the Macintosh platform.

However, while there is some evidence that graduates who were given a Which Bank passbook back in kindergarten often called in for a mortgage, Apple’s foray into the education arena seems to have only helped the students to figure out how to use a mouse, and done bugger all for the company’s bottom line.

The string of campus IT shops set up to flog Apple kit to universities and colleges have nearly all been closed, either because their bosses didn’t get it, or because they didn’t sell enough stuff, or both.

Now Apple seems more interested in selling every student that essential educational accessory known as the iPod.

A closer look at the way software is offered to the education sector reveals a zero opportunity for resellers. The deals are done as far up the tree as the vendor can manage, for as little as $20 per software title.

Resellers pay at least 10 times that amount to put the product on their shelves, so there won’t be many educators queuing for bargains.

That leaves hardware to be offered into the education sector and everyone knows how skinny the margins are for box shifters. Subtract the operating system because the campus-wide deal covers that, and forget about getting paid to even load the stuff, as the campus-wide disk-cloning software licence takes care of that.

The logic of the vendors is hard to ignore, since we’re right back to the initial premise, get ’em while they’re young, and hope they get addicted for life to your way of computing. Add to that the distinct possibility that if the stuff isn’t near as dammit to free, the Open Source penguinistas will soon fill the void, or heaven forbid the little blighters will just pirate your software anyway.

There must be some financial credence to this policy or surely the software vendors’ bean counters would put a halt to this apparent largesse.

Once upon a time there really was a small group of resellers that called themselves education specialists, and sure they liked to make a buck, but they really did believe they were doing a community service at the same time, by helping future generations come to grips with technology.

The vendors have actively promoted a sales model that ensures these foolhardy souls will be forced out of their specialisation and into general box-moving, if they manage not to just go broke and disappear.

There’s no other industry that supports a model whereby the vendors bludgeon their resellers into extinction as a reward for being in close contact with their customer base. Their only crime was choosing the wrong customers and actually giving a damn.

The infiltration of the education sector does not stop with dirt-cheap software. Cisco, Microsoft and now Novell, are all shovelling courseware into campuses that will allow it, which might make it easier to hire a graduate who already knows about real-world IT, but probably doesn’t satisfy the definition of a broad education in matters computational.

Vendor-trained computer gurus will finally deliver what cheap Macintoshes never could — the extinction of independent analysis and a strict adherence to the company line. Do you want fries with that?