Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience at American universities, Microsoft has been successful in getting contracts with the universities, but students don't actually use their products. There are some students that use Outlook's web interface for email, but most forward everything to their personal Gmail accounts. And no one uses Office 365 - everyone knows about & uses Google Docs (again, from their personal Gmail accounts).

However, I don't think that what students use in universities really matters when they transition into the corporate world. Even with BYOD, when everything's on the web, you can just require your employees to use a particular productivity suite. So I'm not convinced that using free/discounted education software to gain mindshare among future employees is an effective tactic.

I can only provide some insides with UK universities.

There also students very frequently were using GMail and just used mail forwarding from their university email accounts.

With at least one large UK university we've seen very strong uptake of the MS Office apps & email (85% vs 30% in the years before). They also have a large number of distance learners for which these solutions are substantially better than what the university offered previously so that might skew the numbers a bit. Uptake of OneDrive for example was much lower around 40% 3 months after the roll-out but still rising. Stats that MS provides on this are mainly MS Exchange (online) based (plus some SharePoint / OneDrive data - the rest of the stats they provide are at best historic or unusable).

At the same time when the university wanted to communicate with all students besides their course work, they used Twitter or Facebook and not email.

I have had the opposite experience. All other students I know use Office constantly and it is truly a requirement. Google apps don't cut it sometimes. I actually own an HP Chromebook 14, but I also have a desktop that runs office that does that job for me.

I think the key is the google classroom offering in K-12, which gives students an incentive to learn the Google ecosystem.

Office 365 is awesome in terms of capability, but it's not a unified experience, and isn't very discoverable. The PC app interactions are somewhat fragile as well. My company uses 365, and very few people use the online tools.

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