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Is Client Platform Diversity Taking Hits Due to Budget Cutting?
4/8/2003
In schools of education, where graduates will depart for a professional world where Macs are a larger part of the scene, they remain more common on campus. In a survey of concurrently running software licenses, many would be surprised to see how highly-ranked Macs are overall, despite their usually lesser numbers on campus, since many users in the creative arts will be running several resource-intensive applications on a Mac at once: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Quark, a video editor, etc. Despite client platform diversity niches, however, intra-departmental diversity is on the wane, despite the argument that by forcing homogeneity you may be depriving some specific hard core, very productive users of their favored tools. It is inarguable, in the short term at least, that most students are headed for a world of PCs, and may anticipate rarely ever doing more at work than running an e-mail client, a browser, Word, and Excel.This writer believes that Apple hardware has more style and panache, and that the Mac OS is more stable and more innovative. And, finally, the cross-platform compatibility for every application I use is near 100 percent. I am even lucky enough to probably be able to sweep up enough department "budget dust" later in the year to be privileged to make the tough decision between Yao's 14" PowerBook G4 and Mini-Me's 17" PowerBook G4. But the fiscal realities at work on campus do point to a greater reduction in client platform diversity in higher education institutions, so maybe it'll be a loaded Dell Precision M50. This may be the last year I have such a choice, unless I am willing to put up the cash myself.
[Postscript: Notice that I am not addressing how Linux fits into the above debate. I think the fiscal crisis is going to badly stunt acceptance of Linux, even if for the wrong reasons. Maybe that's a topic for another opinion piece—if you're interested in writing one, contact me: terry.calhoun@scup.org.]
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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