Friday, October 9, 1998
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Apple's Turnaround Has Little Effect on Campus Mac Use, Administrators SayBy LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
Administrators say this is not a consequence of highly public defections, like Yale University's announcement last year that it could not "guarantee support for Macintoshes beyond June 2000," but instead is the cumulative result of decisions by thousands of users, among them faculty members, students and their parents, and the administrators themselves.
More and more first-year students, say campus computing officials, now come to college already owning computers that run Microsoft's Windows operating system, rather than waiting to purchase whatever the college suggests -- which was traditionally a Macintosh at many liberal-arts institutions, and even some research universities.
At colleges that still recommend Macs, parents now badger administrators with questions about whether students who have used Macs will be employable after they graduate.
But the most serious issue facing Apple, campus computing officials say, is that software developers are letting Macintosh editions of some of their products lag behind versions for P.C.'s -- or are dispensing with Macintosh editions altogether. Particularly troubling to Mac users are several large-scale, Windows-only applications for network and data-base management.
"Slick new apps that used to begin life on the Mac and then get ported to the P.C. are now being created for the P.C., with Apple porting an afterthought," says Malcolm D. Carey, director of academic computing at the University of Maine at Farmington, where Macs are used mainly for teacher-education courses.
"I am also concerned that the majority of developers for the Mac are now chasing the home market opened up by the iMac," Mr. Carey says. "I don't see the serious software that a college needs emerging from iMac-targeted development."
Other campus computing officials echo Mr. Carey's concerns. William H. Parker, associate executive vice-chancellor at the University of California at Irvine, says that "until the software of interest to faculty members is actually available on the Mac at roughly the same time -- and with nearly identical features -- as the Windows version, faculty members have little motivation to consider the Mac as a viable alternative to a Windows platform."
Mr. Parker, who describes himself as "a Mac user and a believer," says the number of students and faculty members using Macintoshes at Irvine is dropping rapidly. Even in disciplines in which Macs have traditionally been strong, such as desktop publishing, "there is serious interest in exploring alternative computing platforms."
"It pains me to say," he adds, "that I see nothing on the immediate horizon that will reverse this trend."
"People are still pretty much convinced that the availability of software is just not there for the Macs," says John Bucher, director of information technology at Oberlin College. Oberlin purchased a campus-wide administrative software system that relies on an Oracle Corporation data base, but, he says, "it's not clear that the Mac is going to support that." He also says, though, that Macs are easier for his staff members to maintain: "On a per-machine basis, to support a Windows environment takes 50 per cent more time."
A spokesman for Apple, John Santoro, counters that many software developers are moving toward Web-based protocols that will run in any Web browser, regardless of the machine behind it. In the near future, he says, "you're going to see us making announcements that show us making a movement on that front." He adds that the Mac is "the preferred platform of faculty members."
At Wabash College, though, the computer-services staff isn't waiting for Web-based protocols to appear. Instead, staff members are installing "Virtual PC" software on new Macintosh G3's for faculty members and others who need to run some Windows applications. "They're able to keep the Mac interface and put up P.C. software that's fast enough for their needs in courses," says William G. Doemel, the computer-center director.
As a practical matter, however, P.C.-emulation software makes sense only for the newest and fastest Macs. On older machines it runs too slowly to satisfy most users.
For many users, the software-availability problem is more a matter of perception than of experience -- but perceptions influence purchasing decisions nonetheless.
"Most of the software that people care about is available on the Mac," says Gavin R. Eadie, director of technology planning for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which has about 4,000 Macs among its 11,000 university-owned machines. He adds that "all the productivity stuff" -- such as word-processing software -- "is well cared for." In this year's incoming class, he says, 67 per cent of the students have Windows machines, 11 per cent have Macintoshes, and the remainder don't own computers.
"I have only heard one person say he couldn't purchase a package he wanted for the Mac," agrees Ronald Heasley, executive director of information and technology services at Elizabethtown College. In the college's administrative offices, he says, 90 per cent of the computers are Macs, as are about a third of the machines in academic departments.
"If we should select a new administrative data base that will not run on the Macs, then we will make a switch," he says. "But I don't foresee that happening. As long as Apple appears to have a healthy future, we will continue to purchase their systems."
"Apple has done an excellent job of trying to accommodate cross-platform users, for instance, by making sure diskettes written on a Pentium can be opened and read by the Apple," says Tom Makofske, director of information services at Colorado College. "However, it's the accounting, project-management, and modeling software that students are more likely to see as they go to graduate school or join a firm -- and a lot of what's available runs on Windows-based machines."
But Lawrence M. Levine, director of computing at Dartmouth College, says Apple needs to improve access to both academic and administrative software. "Either one of those areas can powerfully shape an institution's entire personal-computer environment," he says. Although Dartmouth is still Mac-oriented and only 13 per cent of first-year students chose Windows machines this fall, he says, the college "increasingly has to consider Windows" for administrative systems.
At the College of Wooster, it was a software-availability issue that finally pushed Philip Harriman "over the edge," as he puts it.
"I had always believed that the Mac was the best choice for us," says Mr. Harriman, the college's director of academic computing. "The Mac more quickly fades into the background and becomes a tool, rather than a subject of study itself."
But in June 1997, he says, he purchased expensive statistical software for social scientists from SPSS. "Not two months later, SPSS announced it would no longer support the Mac," he says. "We're stuck at version six. Windows is at version eight or something."
The college now supports both Macs and P.C.'s for academic departments, although Mr. Harriman acknowledges that Windows users are still "kind of on their own."
As at other institutions that are largely Mac-oriented, the question of whether to change platforms comes up regularly. "This fall, with the iMac and confidence in Apple increasing, it's made continuing to be a Mac campus a lot more palatable to senior administrators," Mr. Harriman says. Still, he says he "spent a lot of the summer answering e-mail from first-year students and their parents" about a mailing that said the Mac was Wooster's preferred computer.
"A lot of the time, you get what your parents have at their offices," says Mr. Bucher of Oberlin, where this is the first year in which more students have Windows machines than Macs, by a 3-to-2 margin. Prices for Macs are one reason, he says. "Every time you turn around, there's a place to buy a cheap Pentium machine -- prices have come down so fast and so far." Macs have almost always cost more to buy than equivalent P.C.'s, although studies have repeatedly suggested that the Apple products subsequently cost less to maintain.
Still, the purchase price can be a deterrent. "I've seen no iMacs yet this year," says Mr. Carey, of the University of Maine at Farmington. "I expect to see some in January, but Christmas in this state is more likely to bring $850 P.C.'s than $1,240 iMacs."
Background stories from The Chronicle:
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Copyright © 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education