A Mac-Centric Campus Shifts to Windows

No one should mistake Richard Lucier for one of those corporate types

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who never loved a Mac. "I didn't want anybody to touch my Macintosh," he remembers thinking. "There was no talking to me about Windows."

A little more than a year ago, Mr. Lucier became the new head librarian of Dartmouth College, which nearly 20 years ago was one of the first institutions to create a network of Apple Macintosh computers. Soon after arriving at Dartmouth, Mr. Lucier, who by then was a Windows user, asked his administrative staff members to break with tradition and agree to give up their Macs. Switching to Windows machines, he told them, would eliminate persistent problems the college has had generating reports from its administrative programs and databases. His administrators went along, without complaint.

At first, Dartmouth's computer experts had thought that increasing their use of Web-based technology would eliminate the system crashes and often intolerable response times that disrupted Mac users when they ran some of the college's administrative software. But Web technology has not been the panacea that many administrators had believed it would be, so much of the college's administration is switching to Windows PC's.

It is part of a trend that has altered the computer culture at this historically Mac-centric college. The trend is significant, given Dartmouth's role as a computing leader in academe, and it is happening just as Apple is trying new strategies to expand its market share in higher education.

A look at students here also shows how difficult the task could be for Apple. In the fall of 1998, 80 percent of all freshmen fulfilled Dartmouth's computer requirement by buying Macs. Only 20 percent chose Windows machines. But since the fall of 2000, the majority of Dartmouth freshmen have been bringing Windows computers to college or buying them from the college store after they arrive. Among students entering last fall, 80 percent had or soon bought Windows PC's. Only 20 percent chose Macs. Dartmouth no longer recommends that students buy Macs, and the computer preferences of its freshmen seem to mirror the preference for Windows in the business world.

"If this trend continues or if it increases, the results are obvious," says Lawrence Levine, director of computing services at Dartmouth. The rival platforms now are about equally matched in number on Dartmouth's network. Ten years ago, when at least 95 percent of the computers on the network were Macs, Dartmouth had more than 10,000 Apple machines. Today, the number is about 6,000.

The problems that Dartmouth has had trying to get Macs to run the institution's administrative software are problems that other colleges have had, and they partly explain why Apple Computer has seen a continuing decline in its share of the computer market in higher education. Apple once owned about a 30-percent share of the higher-education market, according to some analysts. But since the early- to mid-90s, its share has continued to shrink. "Our best estimate at this point is that it is about 9 percent," says Michael Zastrocky, vice president for academic strategies at Gartner Inc., a technology consulting firm.

Apple officials say that accurate market-share data are difficult to come by. But a declining market share in higher education "is something that we need to acknowledge," says Cheryl Vedoe, Apple's vice president for education marketing and products. "That's not been something that just happened all of a sudden. Regaining that share is also not going to happen overnight."

Apple has always touted the integration of its computers' components as the brand's greatest asset and as the reason why students and faculty members find Macs easy to use. But the people today who are making technology decisions for colleges worry about a different type of integration. Their job is to make Macs and Windows machines run the colleges' administrative and academic software, and their frustration with Macs that don't integrate well with commonly used administrative software is driving colleges further away from Apple.

"We've struggled for many years to try to make the Macintosh a viable desktop machine for administrative systems, and it's getting more and more problematic," says Mr. Levine.

An Eroding Relationship

In 1984, Dartmouth tied its future to Apple Computer when college officials recommended that entering freshmen -- members of the Class of 1988 -- buy the new Macintosh computer that Apple introduced that year. For almost two decades, year after year, Dartmouth bought Apple computers and recommended them to its students.

In the early years of the Macintosh, Apple maintained close ties with Dartmouth, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and other research universities and colleges that helped Apple develop software for the new computer. The research produced some useful academic software and various utilities, or computer-housekeeping programs. Many of those software programs have evolved over the years and are still in wide use today.

By the mid-1990s, however, Apple began having serious financial problems, and it stopped awarding grants to colleges to develop software for the Macintosh. It also changed marketing approaches repeatedly, altering or canceling discount programs that colleges relied on and making other decisions that angered administrators. In 1997, top administrators at Dartmouth became sufficiently concerned about Apple's financial condition that they organized a group of faculty members and administrators to consider the future of Apple computers at the university. Ultimately, the committee recommended no drastic changes.

Today, the students and even many faculty and staff members at Dartmouth are moving on -- unsentimentally -- from a computing tradition that defined the campus for nearly two decades. The most visible signposts of change are in the rooms of new students, many of whom used Windows computers in high school, and in Dartmouth's administrative offices. Over the next three years, the Macs on many administrators' desks will be carted out and replaced by Windows machines. The college's president, James Wright, a historian and a longtime Mac user, is resigned to the change. "I will shift whenever someone tells me to," Mr. Wright says.

Some analysts see the changes at Dartmouth as part of a larger trend that is transforming how colleges manage information technology. More and more colleges are copying a model that businesses use, even hiring some of the same people who have managed technology for corporations, says Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga Information Group, a market-research firm.

As Mr. Enderle sees it, the business world has adopted the "Wintel" model, with a narrowing of users' computer choices to a standard Intel PC running Microsoft Windows. Companies prefer that most of their employees use the same type of computer because standardization makes it easier and less costly for businesses to provide technical support and user training.

Industry computer managers come into academe with Wintel skills and "tend to drive a set of standards ... that also favors Wintel," Mr. Enderle says. Last year, Dartmouth hired Bradley Noblet, a veteran computer-industry manager, as its new director of computing technical services. Among his credentials are success at helping one company, Cayman Systems, make the transition from Macs to PC's.

Mr. Levine says the reality at Dartmouth is much less "corporate" than Mr. Enderle's analysis would suggest. The administration's transition to Windows, he says, will not affect students or faculty members, who can continue to use whatever computer best suits their needs.

The extent to which faculty members expect to make their own decisions about computers often complicates life on campuses. "We respect diversity in various guises, as you probably know," says Gavin Eadie, director of strategic technologies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which has a large number of Macs on its network. That means, he says, that the university respects -- to the extent possible -- the rights of students and faculty and staff members to select the computer they prefer to use.

In fact, it was only because of persistent problems in getting the college's administrative software to run properly on Macs that many Dartmouth administrators reached the conclusion that their own Macs would have to go, says Mr. Levine, the computing-services director.

The college uses Oracle Financials for accounting, SCT Banner for payroll and student records, and Oracle databases.

Conventional wisdom says that software written for Web browsers should run on any computer, whether it is a Macintosh, Windows, or other computer. But the truth of the matter, Mr. Levine says, is that specific software programs and databases don't always work the same way with both the Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers, or with both the Macintosh and Windows operating systems -- or even with different versions of the same operating system. Such glitches often prevent even Web-based administrative systems from working. "It's driven our support costs up and everybody's frustration level up," Mr. Levine says.

Apple's New Efforts

Apple's response is that Mac OS X, the company's new Unix-based operating system, will fix those integration problems. Ms. Vedoe, the Apple executive, says that Mac OS X, with its Unix underpinnings and its use of network and document standards, "makes us far better able than we've ever been to fit right into the existing infrastructure." But whether that would be true in Dartmouth's case would take "a lot of time and effort to verify," Mr. Levine says.

Whatever the outcome for Dartmouth from its decision about administrators' Macs, the news cannot be what Apple executives want to hear. The company, analysts say, has been working hard to maintain its loyal base of Mac users, while at the same time trying new strategies to reach people who have never bought an Apple computer.

"Apple is still profitable, but the trends don't look good," says Mr. Enderle, the Giga analyst. "[Apple] is losing a significant number of bids and opportunities, so we do not yet see a rebound."

Mr. Zastrocky, the Gartner analyst, is similarly pessimistic about Apple's future in higher education. "I'm not convinced that they'll be able to get back into that market."

Apple executives say they were encouraged this spring by the numbers of college students who bought Macintoshes. "I would say we're a little more optimistic than the analysts," Ms. Vedoe says.

Analysts and higher-education officials acknowledge that Apple has taken steps in recent months to cause colleges to take a second look. For the first time, Apple has offered to cut its prices by $100 to $150 per machine to match Dell Computer's prices for the Optiplex GX 240 and Optiplex GX 260 desktop and Latitude notebook computers that Dartmouth will offer for sale to freshmen in the fall. The pricing strategy, which is a new one for Apple, does not surprise Mr. Enderle. "Dell has been pretty much buying the [higher-education] market," he says. "Apple is trying to be more responsive to the cost pressures that they're seeing."

Apple also has been attentive to the needs of colleges in developing new products, Mr. Enderle says. Apple recently announced a new education computer, the eMac, for higher-education and elementary and secondary institutions. The eMac is the low-end desktop model that Dartmouth will offer in its computer store in the fall. The high-end Apple desktop model will be a PowerMac G4 MT. Two notebooks, an Apple iBook and a PowerBook G4, will be offered as well.

The other new product, Xserve, is Apple's first rack-mounted server. Apple has offered servers for years, but company officials say this one is meant for central-computing managers, like those at colleges, who prefer to keep their servers in floor-to-ceiling racks, where they take up less space.

In March last year, Apple brought out Mac OS X, its new operating system, which is supposed to make Macs less prone to crashing. It is based on Unix, an operating system most often used by scientists and engineers. Some time ago, Dartmouth engineering faculty members had their students switch to Windows computers from Unix, which is often difficult for students to master, says John Winn, a professor of chemistry who is chairman of the Council on Computing at Dartmouth. "Now with OS X, they may very well go back," he says. One of the reasons is that a huge amount of free Unix source code for special-purpose scientific and engineering programs can be "pretty easily" recompiled to run on Mac OS X, he says.

Campus-computing officials also credit Apple for jump-starting the "wireless revolution" that has transformed Dartmouth and other campuses. Many colleges bought Apple's wireless-access hubs, called Airports, for $269 each. "Airport had a gigantic influence in terms of getting people to realize the benefits of being wireless," Mr. Levine says -- even though many colleges, including Dartmouth, went with Cisco Systems' wireless equipment when they extended wireless coverage across the campus.

Other Apple products, including iMovie, a basic video-editing program, have been hits as teaching tools at Dartmouth. "There's nothing really comparable on the Windows side," says Malcolm Brown, director of academic computing at Dartmouth.

iMovie is permitting faculty members not only to display video resources easily but also to give students video assignments -- some faculty members call them multimedia essays.

"Acquiring knowledge, and assimilating it, and integrating it, and coming up with something new, and then communicating it is no longer just a text-based proposition -- it's video and audio as well," Mr. Brown says.

Diminishing Market Share

Dartmouth officials say they no longer have concerns about Apple's survival, but they do worry that Apple's diminished overall market share -- estimated by some analysts to be less than 5 percent -- could mean that companies on which Dartmouth depends for academic software may decide to discontinue their Macintosh versions. Mac OS X has been well received, but some users still gripe that third-party software makers have been slow to release OS X-compatible versions of their programs.

Most of the companies that Dartmouth depends on for academic software, including Microsoft, have endorsed the new operating system. "Office for the Mac is pretty important," Mr. Brown says. But ESRI, which makes software that Dartmouth uses for mapping, has said it has no plans to make Mac OS X versions of its products.

Some Dartmouth faculty members still create their own Mac programs to use in teaching and research. One such program is Mr. Winn's original data-analysis tool, called Least Squares, which helps students fit their data to common mathematical functions. But while such projects survive as a cottage industry on the campus, nearly all new central-computing projects and library plans are Web-based. "We're really looking to build things that work in a much larger environment," says Mr. Lucier, the head librarian.

Some students seem to thrive in the new environment at Dartmouth, using both Macs and PC's -- depending on what is available, and therefore, most convenient. Even among those who prefer Macs, these students lack the passion of Mac purists. Asa Tapley is a senior history major who, like other Dartmouth students, says he uses computers "constantly" for BlitzMail -- Dartmouth's homegrown e-mail -- and for writing papers and doing online research. "It's partly my personality -- I like computers," he says. "I don't really care if it's a Mac or a PC, except that I'm just much faster on a Mac."