Dell Playing Second Fiddle to Apple in Education Sector?
The education sector has always been a desirable market for brand-name PC makers. Why? High volume, sufficiently long contracts and what I call the all-important “indoctrination” factor - i.e. the opportunity for students to be “indoctrinated” into the use of the company’s PCs. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realise that if students get used to Apple iBooks, they have a higher tendency of staying with iBooks as adults.
And recently, Apple jumped one step ahead of (or rather, retained its lead over) Dell in the education sector when it was “…awarded the contract to continue supplying laptops to Middle school students and teachers (grades 6-8) in Henrico County (some 12,675 units), beating Dell and other PC makers.” It’s a four-year contract too, worth nearly $16 million.
Apparently, one of the reasons why Dell lost the deal was that it’s offer last year expired in Nov. 2005. Dell’s proposal was more than $100 per unit lower than Apple’s successful offer ($1,246 vs. $1,111). As a result, Mac priests enthusiasts are crawling all over the deal - saying that “…Henrico County School Board appears to have learned their lesson well…” - a reference to the School Board’s decision to use Dell (over Apple) for their high school students last year.
[News via MacDailyNews]
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House of Dell » Apple Passes Dell As Top Vendor For W. European Education Market said,
Pingback • February 21, 2006 @ 5:00 am
[…] The announcement that Apple has passed Dell as top vendor for the Western European education market comes in the wake of Dell’s failure to wrench a $16 million contract to supply laptops to Henrico County middle school students and teachers from Apple. […]