Update on Michigan’s iPod idea/scandal
April 15th, 2007 • education, idiocy
Over the past week since the idea was proposed, people have been muckracking about not only the state’s hapless financial problems but now they’ve got something else to bitch and moan about: Apple paid for part of the trip for the Senators pushing the bill .
Wow. Big freakin’ deal. I guess most people think companies wanting to land big customers never do things like this…ever. Or perhaps all of these people are just being naive. In the past, I’ve had companies buy me lunches (amongst things) to help sway me to their product and this is no different. Albeit a bit more pricy than a nice steak luncheon, it’s still in the same ball park of “Buy my product not that other guy’s.” Duke University did nearly the same thing two years ago and they’re not the only ones. Apple’s education program has many suitors to its courtships each year, whether they’re educational institutions or not. Fortunately for most of the education institutions, their meetings always bear successful fruit. And in the reverse, many companies out there actually pay other companies to come hawk their wares to them. In the end, the company selling the products not only gets a free plane ride, they probably sell some goods and make more money. So why is this such a big deal?
I have no idea but a lot of people are up-in-arms about it. Last year, Cisco came to my old job in this big fancy van to show off some VOIP products and their ability to converge with our existing network infrastructure. Monetarily how did this come about? Well, they paid us for them to come and gave us some free gadgets in the process. They spoke ad nauseum about their fancy IP phones and other sundries that most of us didn’t pay attention because we were too busy thinking “Just how in the hell am I going to teach end users how to use a $6,000 IP phone that can microwave meals?” but no one in our fair University was pointing fingers at us for trying to land a fish too big for our initiative. And this is where the Michigan deal is no different. Apparently, their school system is in pretty horrid shape and the state’s too poor — generally speaking — to do much about it. Now they bring about a new bill that, while costing a pretty $40M, could enhance the educational aspect of K-12 schooling. Starting at the toddler level, this would engrain a wonderful ideal into the children that these shiny iPods can actually serve a useful purpose other than blasting MP3s and syncing podcasts.
Unfortunately, most people are outside the realm of education and still think it’s their place to lambaste this (and most of them are NOT in Michigan so their thoughts should immediately be nullified). All the current commenters about this on TechDirt are people mostly under the age of voting and still want to spout off about how useless this endeavour is. From a simplistic standpoint, I don’t know too many kids that would be utterly unthrilled about receiving a free $300 device for their own personal use. When students get “free” laptops from their schools, many of them are overjoyed and end up actually using them for school work. What most — if not nearly all — people fail to realize in this bill, the iPod simply replaces the laptop but the educational value does not diminish.
Moral of the story? A big company wants you to buy a lot of their product from them so they fly you out for exclusive and personalized promotion of it. When this chance arrives, take it whether you go with their product or not. Why? This is an accepted business tactic regardless of what all the pundits may say to you.