Michael Dell, I challenge you to a fistfight in the parking lot of every school in America
Wednesday, June 16th by Bill Palmer
Sometimes, it takes a brush with a complete idiot to help you get your thoughts in order. And during our Online MUG educator chat this past Monday evening, that's exactly what happened to me. You see, one of the items I'd included on the agenda was titled "the realities of OS X migration," and my reason for placing it on the agenda was that I was hoping to hear just how the OS X transition is going in the various schools and districts that were represented by the attendees. After receiving some rather positive responses that were putting quite a smile on my face, someone stepped in and dropped a bombshell:
"Why bother upgrading to OS X, it makes more sense to go wintel. We have had to dump all our macs and replace with PCs because it cost too much for the OS X licenses."
Heh, so much for a controversy-free meeting. You can imagine the kind of hilarity that ensued (and no, you can't have a copy of the transcript -- show up to the meeting next time!).
After being challenged by just about everyone else in attendance to provide some kind of basis for his, uh, interesting claim, the participant went on to provide a series of rationales that ranged from unfortunate myth to outright lie. Not one of his arguments was even accurate, let alone valid. It didn't take long to realize that the individual was little more than a well-disguised troll. Heck, after several of us managed to collectively debunk every education-related myth that he presented, he then turned around and suddenly claimed that the entire time, he'd been talking about a corporation, not a school. Nice try, buddy. If ever there's been a time when I actually wished I could reach through the screen and begin choking someone, this might have been it.
But still, he brought up an interesting point, just not the point he was trying to. Whether this guy really was from a school district, or a corporation, or had simply made the whole thing up, he unwittingly unveiled the gameplan being carried out by Wintel-centric entities within school districts everywhere: spread as many lies about MacOS X as humanly possible. Because, you see, once a faculty and staff gets its hands on MacOS X and sees what it's really about, there is absolutely no way that Wintel ever has any chance left of invading that school. If Wintel tried to go after a school that was already knee-deep into MacOS X, the school-based employees would be lined up in front of the school with pitchforks in order to stop it, if necessary. And Dell and Microsoft know it.
If Wintel-based vendors want to be victorious in a school district, they have to find a way to get that district adopt a plan to move to a 100% Windows environment before MacOS X ever sees the light of day in that district. And, as we all know, the best way (by far) to prevent a move to MacOS X is to spread enough evil propaganda to destroy its reputation long before anyone involved gets the chance to get their hands on OS X and decide for themselves.
When I think back to the two schools that I worked at in Broward County, the respective technology programs were like night and day. They were both quality schools and they were both 100% Macintosh, but the similarities began and ended there. I worked full-time at one of the schools for five years, and toward the very end of my tenure in the district, I began also working six hours a week (after-hours) at another school about three miles down the road.
At the one school that I worked at full-time for five years (and I do mean full-time; forty hour workweeks are for wimps), one hundred percent of the staff had voluntarily migrated to MacOS X, teacher laptop use was through the roof, the entire student lab curriculum was built around iLife and Keynote, and voluntary attendance by teachers at school-based technology workshops was impressive. MacOS X had come into the school as such a godsend, such a breath of fresh air, that seven faculty members actually went out and bought themselves a Mac for home use as well.
And then there was the other school I worked at. The school had never had a real tech specialist, instead trying to rely on an overworked and under-expertised group of staff members who tried to work as a team to respond to individual tech support issues in their spare time. When it was decided that this wasn't working, they brought me in to help part-time, after-hours. In the two months I was there, despite only working six hours a week, I was able to get the school completely caught up on back-logged support issues, and even managed to bring many of the school's existing Macs up to some semblance of a minimum pre-OS X standard (MacOS 9.2.2, the latest versions of AppleWorks 6, etc.). But I just wasn't there frequently enough or long enough to even think about bringing MacOS X to the table.
And you know what? At that second school, Dell could have waltzed in and stood at least a decent shot at making some headway. Because all I'd done was proven to the school's decision-makers that the only reason their Macs appeared to have so many problems is that they'd gone for so many years with no one there to do even the most minimum amount of maintenance, support, and upkeep. Even though I'd gotten things to the point where my six hours a week resulted in their Macs having very few problems (other than ones caused strictly by user error), I hadn't been able to provide them with any direction, or any awareness that they weren't within a country mile of giving their students a taste of actual, modern educational technology. In other words, I couldn't give them the gift of MacOS X.
Some of you, whose schools and districts are knee-deep into MacOS X, know exactly what I'm talking about (or perhaps you know what I'm talking about because you use MacOS X at home). Others of you, whose schools are still chugging along on MacOS 9, are probably scratching your heads, wondering what I'm talking about, or wondering if the claims I'm making about the miracle of MacOS X even come close to representing the truth, and if migration is really worth it.
Well, the next two articles I write for this site are going to address this issue head-on. One article will focus on smashing the myths (no, let's call them what they are: outright lies being spread for tactical reasons) surrounding the costs associated with migrating from OS 9 to OS X, especially in comparison to the asinine notion of replacing a school's Macs with PC's. The other article will focus on just what you can do, as a school tech specialist, to get your faculty and staff not just wanting to move to MacOS X, but literally begging to be allowed to. I know that this is possible because in the first school I mentioned above, I managed to make it happen...and it wasn't all that hard to pull off.
Something tells me that I need to get both articles written sooner than later. Because right now, there are a number of Mac-using schools and districts who, despite being only a stone's throw away from discovering the miracle that is MacOS X, are incredibly vulnerable to missing out on the opportunity permanently (due to Wintel backers spreading non-stop lies in order to keep the move to MacOS X from happening so that no one will much care when they then try to bring in PC's).
Michael Dell, I formally challenge you to a fistfight in the parking lot of every school in America. If you want to convince a corporation to diminish its own profitability and effectiveness by using PC's instead of Macs, then that's between you and them. But neither you nor anyone else has the right to take that big of a chunk of our students' education away from them. I'm on to you Michael, and because some idiot in chatroom gave away your gameplan, I know right where to hit you. By the time I'm done with you, Mr. Dell, you'll be begging for the chance to go back to peddling your crap to corporate drones, afraid to ever set foot on a school campus again.
The line must be drawn here. This far, no farther. If you're a Mac-using school that has yet to see the light about MacOS X, I'm going to help you get there, if it's the last thing I do...before someone else manages to step in and condemn your students to eternal darkness.
contact the author, Bill Palmer
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