Worst Mac advertising EVER

Working in an IT department at a school, we get quite a lot of cold advertising – brochures, product pamphlets and of course cold calls from sales guys. It’s irritating, but all part of the ride.

Most of the advertising is pretty generic – “Save $$$ on Genuine HP Toner!”, “Why Your Kids Will Love This Badly-Coded Piece of Crap!”, and so on…  Normally it goes straight into the recycling with barely a second glance, but it’s very rare that material will come in which makes everyone in the office roll on the floor laughing.

Such was the case when we received a brochure from Computers Now, an Apple reseller based in Victoria and NSW who have hooks into the education market. The brochure was spruiking various offerings for education institutions, but the front page featured a piece entitled “Why choose a cross platform environment?”. Check it out here before reading any further.

*** hold music….Greensleeves in MIDI format ***

OK, now that you’re back, how did you find that? Wiped the sprayed coffee off your computer screen? I barely know where to start on this one. It’s been a while since I’ve read anything which combines such woeful technical inaccuracy with sweeping illogical statements, all combining to demonstrate that Computers Now (or whoever wrote the article) knows absolutely nothing about the education industry, ICT or technology in general.

It’s depressing to see the same old Mac myths trotted out in glossy print, but for many Mac establishments they tend to be the only way that they can rationalise spending the whopping premium for products and services which they have no way of avoiding. It is interesting that Computers Now took the “cross platform” approach – they’ve clearly worked out that the “Mac only” approach is doomed to failure – possibly because they themselves shot that argument in the foot with their opening rant about avoiding becoming a single OS environment.

There are two real issues here, and both revolve around a massive misunderstanding about the role of computers in schools. The first is that no commercial operating system offers any benefit to education (an open source exception might be Edubuntu). And why should they? They’re just platforms, after all. What is really important is what you do with them – what applications are made available and achieving a clear and consistent message from teacher to student.

The second is that ICT is always pitched around the client experience. This might be fine in small institutions – a few dozen machines with a tech guy to run around and support them, but eventually you hit a point of scale where you need to leverage off supporting backend technologies much more effectively and at this point multiple client operating systems from different vendors are just a hindrance. Schools are sometimes seen as small technology shops and are often treated as such, but the reality is that many schools have large and highly complex IT infrastructures which fit firmly into the enterprise market with all the requisite needs.

In such environments you don’t do yourself or your users any favours by allowing clients to dictate direction to the backend. All that waffle about cross platform flexibility is utter garbage – an integrated environment built around common technologies gives you far more flexibility and scope for change, innovation and value than any cross platform scenario ever could and, incidentally, a much, much higher return on investment.

The claim that running Macs in a cross platform environment results in a reduced ROI is a claim of breathtaking audacity and ignorance. Presumably this claim assumes that ROI does NOT include backend infrastructure, user management, resource management, user and technical training, support costs, system maintenance or the pain with dealing with multiple vendors.

If I worked for Apple PR/marketing I’d be horrified by this article, which links their products with some of the most uninformed piffle imaginable.