Microsoft, Google pitching cloud to educators

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 17 March 2009 07:49

Business IT - Networking

The education market has long been an arena for 'hearts and minds' struggles in the IT arena. Now Google and Microsoft are actively pitching their cloud offerings to education.

Vendors have been cutting deals for the education market for decades - perhaps partly to be seen as good corporate citizens (though this was going on long before that phrase came into common use), but also as part of a 'catch them young' strategy.

The idea was that those exposed to particular systems and packages would be more likely to want to use them when they entered the workforce.

While this dates back to the mainframe era, would Unix and its derivatives have become so popular if it hadn't been available to computer science departments?

Would the Macintosh have met the same fate as the Lisa if not for the Apple University Consortium program that put heavily-discounted Macs into the hands of institutions and their students?

Today, the mood is shifting to cloud computing, which can be characterised as "let somebody else do the work."

Both Google and Microsoft are reporting successful cloud implementations by educational institutions in Australia and New Zealand. Please read on.