Chromebook making inroads into K-12 Education and growing

I came across this WSJ article on the market share grab of Chromebooks.
You can read the entire article here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304856504579338941198812358

(image: WSJ)

I can totally see this happening. I've interviewed quite a number of schools and I have friends that are in the IT business for schools. Schools are strapped for cash and Chromebooks are highly appealing. They don't have to worry about maintaining servers, infrastructure, security, storage. I am also not surprised at the iPad penetration. Every private school I interviewed for my kids, the iPad was in the curriculum. However, the difference is the Chromebooks are way cheaper to purchase and to maintain from an infrastructure point of view.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few years. There are those who dismiss Chromebooks but at $200, they're practically disposable and bullet proof for little kids. My five year constantly drops and abuses his Chromebook and we don't even worry about it to much. Most of the school curriculum are web based and unfortunately, many of them still use Adobe Flash so he turns to his Chromebook quite a bit over his iOS device.

In the meantime, Microsoft appoints a new CEO with a strong cloud infrastructure background. There is hope Satya Nadella has some sort of education strategy in place. Today's children are future customers for any of the tech giants.

Here is case study of how a Kentucky private school deployed chromebooks for their middleschoolers. Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/private-schools-chromebook-program-explains-why-googles-laptops-have-captured-nearly-20-of-the-educational-market/

The most telling quote is this:

"While cost savings can be made on the cost of the hardware alone, the majority of the cost savings originate from savings made from infrastructure and device management.

I think that is what really matters. The infrastructure cost and ease-of-management.