Microsoft Gets an “A” for its Education Efforts (Premium)

Last year, I argued that Microsoft can’t afford to lose the education market. Has the software giant made any progress since then?

You can find out about Microsoft’s latest efforts in Microsoft Expands its Education Push with New Windows 10 PCs, Mixed Reality, and Office Updates. In that post, Mehedi explains today’s education announcements, which run a pretty wide gamut and are tied to a major education conference in London. Here, I will try to put these announcements in perspective, in part by looking back at how Microsoft has been addressing the Chromebook threat in education over the past year, and up to and including the most recent developments.As you’ll see, Microsoft has taken this threat very seriously.

They are wise to do so: As I pointed out last Spring, Microsoft cannot afford to lose the education market. And not just because it is a lucrative, enterprise-like market in some ways. Looked at more broadly, the education market has an even bigger impact on Microsoft’s future because the battle for education is really a battle for the future. That is, students entering the workforce will expect to use what they’re familiar with. And increasingly, that includes Chromebooks and Google services, especially here in the United States.

Chromebooks are not a US-only phenomenon, of course. For now, Microsoft still controls the overall education market worldwide. And “Windows 10 is the global leader for devices chosen for K-12 education,” Terry Myerson noted at last May’s Microsoft #EDU event, a point that bolstered later in the year when Microsoft reported that it saw strong growth of Windows PC sales to the education market, in the US and elsewhere.

So what steps led to that success?

Some of it is just Microsoft’s legacy: Teachers and school administrators are familiar with Windows, Office, and Microsoft’s other traditional offerings. Some of it is basic market advantages: Office 365 for Education provides teachers and students with the full-featured Office desktop applications which are much more powerful than mobile apps on other platforms. Microsoft has also pushed into creating STEM lesson plans, improving the accessibility of its various offerings, and pushing into Mixed Reality and interactive whiteboarding.

But the firm knew it needed to do more, as Mr. Myerson expressed last May. Microsoft talked to teachers and educators, and they were told they needed a complete solution that can scale. That kids get distracted, and Windows needed to be more resilient, and offer a fast login time, not just the first time, but for an entire school year. Windows, in other words, had to match and beat the capabilities that Google was offering to education with Chromebook and its simple and centralized management capabilities.

And at that event, Microsoft announced the following initiatives.

Windows 10 S. This streamlined, simpler, and more secure version of Windows 10—what Myerson called “the soul of today’s Windows”—was “inspired by students and teachers.” It only runs secure, verified apps, is easy to set up and manage, and will not suffer from performance rot over time. Windows 10 S offers a much faster login experience than Windows 10 Pro, Microsoft claims, though I believe most of the gain is due to the lack of desktop applications running startup items. Regardless, the goal is to get as close as possible to Chrome OS, which boots up in only a few seconds.

Full Office in the Microsoft Store. To address the obvious downside to a Windows version that cannot run traditional desktop applications, Microsoft said it would “soon” bring Office 2016 for Windows to what is now called the Microsoft Store. That effort is still not complete, but it is absolutely fair to point out that these apps are much more capable than Google’s web-based productivity apps.

Microsoft Edge education features. Microsoft has also been adding education-inspired features to Microsoft Edge, the only major browser that will run in Windows 10 S. These include Set aside tabs for research and Annotations so students can highlight things they read and then share it. Edge remains a weak link in Windows 10 S, in my opinion, but these features are certainly well-intentioned.

Set Up My School PCs. To address the simplicity and capabilities of Google’s centralized management solution for Chrome, Microsoft has created a new dashboard called Set Up My School PCs that helps teachers or admins to set up and configure new PCs using a simple wizard. It connects PCs to school’s Office 365 and Azure AD services and creates a USB-based installer that can be replicated so that an entire classroom of PCs can be quickly updated with a new software image. According to Myerson, it takes less than 30 seconds before the USB key can be taken out and brought to the next PC.

Intune for Education. Microsoft customized its excellent enterprise systems management solution schools, making it simpler and aware of things like carts, classrooms, teachers, and students. Intune for Education became broadly available in May 2016.

Hardware partners. Microsoft provided a list of PC makers—Acer, ASUS, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Samsung, and Toshiba—which would sell new education-based PCs at prices starting at just $189, matching or even undercutting most Chromebooks. Lenovo was notably absent from that list, but the firm is onboard as of this week. “The goal is to develop the same vibrant partner-centric ecosystem” for Windows S is as is the case with mainstream Windows, Myerson explained. Not clear at that time, however, is that these PCs don’t actually come with Windows 10 S: Instead, schools can choose which version of Windows to use at purchase time. And if they do choose S, it’s free.

Future PCs. Myerson promised “beautiful new premium devices with Windows 10 S” from these partners in the months ahead, but that has never happened. Microsoft did, of course, launch Surface Laptop at this event, but that PC is not aimed at education. And it remains as the only Windows 10 S offering of note.

Minecraft Education Edition. Minecraft is a truly compelling and unique solution for education, and all of the education PCs would come with a free one-year subscription to Minecraft Education Edition for Windows 10 education PCs too.

Office 365 Education. Now available with Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Education is free for all schools on existing Windows 10 Pro PCs and on new Pcs. Office 365 for Education is also free for teachers and students worldwide.

“This is our complete solution for education,” Mr. Myerson said at the May education event. And all of it was available in time for the 2017-2018 school year.

But Microsoft didn’t stop there: In September, it announced Microsoft 365 for Education, a new offering that expands Office 365 Education with Enterprise Mobility + Security, Windows 10, and Minecraft: Education Edition. Microsoft says it “gives students, faculty, and staff everything they need to create and collaborate securely.” [It is, as I described it elsewhere, “Microsoft as a service.”](Enterprise Mobility + Security, Windows 10, and Minecraft: Education Edition. Microsoft says it “gives students, faculty, and staff everything they need to create and collaborate securely.”)

In December, [Microsoft also announced that its efforts were paying off](Enterprise Mobility + Security, Windows 10, and Minecraft: Education Edition. Microsoft says it “gives students, faculty, and staff everything they need to create and collaborate securely.”) and that it was seeing “strong growth” of Windows PCs in education.

I don’t feel that a single quarter of data tells the full story, as I noted in Thinking About Windows 10, Chromebook, and the Education Market(Premium), more than half U.S. primary- and secondary-school students—over 30 million students—are using Chromebooks and Google’s cloud-based productivity services, and not Windows and Microsoft’s other offerings.

But Microsoft, again, is not done. This week, at BETT, the software giant has announced a further set of initiatives aimed at improving its position in the education market. Mehedi covered the news earlier today, but I spoke with Microsoft director Jay Paulus last week about these efforts, and have a few takeaways. Here’s what they announced.

More PCs, more partners. A new generation of education-focused PCs will hit the market this year, with prices starting at just $189. Keeping the starting price at the same level as last year is important, I think. As important was adding Lenovo, the world’s second-biggest PC maker, to the ranks. “These PCs are more powerful than Chromebooks,” Paulus told me.

Enhancements to Office. Office 365 for Education is built on the powerful enterprise versions of the product line, and it benefits from the improvements that happen on the commercial side, but comes with simpler management tools. Microsoft Teams, for example, can create class-based groups automatically so students can get up and running quickly. But the Office applications are being updated regularly, too. For example, PowerPoint 2016 is being updated to include the features that used to be separately available in Office Mix. And students can publish their creations, and share them securely, with Microsoft Stream.

New Learning Tools. Microsoft’s Learning Tools are among its most inspiring offerings, as they help students learn how to read and, when needed, catch up with their classmates in a way that is not public or embarrassing. This week, Microsoft is announcing an expansion of those capabilities to Word 2016, Word Online, and Microsoft Edge.

Expanded STEM investments. After studying the impact of its STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—curriculum, Microsoft was surprised to discover that fully one-third of young adults still don’t have the skills they need. “There is huge demand for these skills,” Paulus said, “and hundreds of thousands of jobs go unfilled each year because of this gap.” So Microsoft is expanding its STEM-based curriculum with a variety of partners. One, Pearson, has created immersive apps for Windows Mixed Reality and HoloLens headsets. “One is a visceral 3D replica of a patient so you can detect diseases and other problems,” Paulus said. This builds on the 3D/VR/MR capabilities in Windows 10, Office, and Minecraft, he told me.

Chemistry comes to Minecraft. In what might turn out to be one of the biggest updates announced this week, Microsoft is enhancing Minecraft: Education Edition to support chemistry via a free update. “Last year, we added coding capabilities to Minecraft,” Paulus explained. “But it was all about mining blocks and combining them. So we’re taking that functionality to chemistry, where you might do things like combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water. It’s a really exciting way to teach.” And, yes, it is a free update.

This is a pretty impressive list of improvements, and when you add it to Microsoft’s initiatives from last year you see the makings of that complete, scalable solution that Mr. Myerson spoke of in May. Microsoft’s Chromebook problem is real, and especially here in the United States. But not for the first time I see the company—really, Terry Myerson’s part of the company—addressing a problem head-on, and aggressively.

We will need time to see whether these efforts bear fruit, and whether last quarter’s bump was a one-time anomaly or the start of a new trend in which Microsoft slowly takes back the US education market. So we’ll see. But there is little doubt that it is doing everything it can, and then some, to respond to a clear threat.