In her letter, Vedoe said her goal is to “lead the company’s efforts to deliver technologies and solutions that meet the unique requirements of both K-12 and Higher Education.”
“The past decade has seen great progress in providing access to technology in our schools, as measured by student-to-computer ratios and the number of schools and classrooms that are now wired for the Internet. But at Apple we strongly believe that providing access to technology is just the first step. The discussion of technology in education needs to be about more than the technology; it needs to be about education.”
Vedoe said that Apple’s commitment is to ensure that schools have the right products and solutions to support the entire education community — students, teachers and faculty, administrators, and parents. The goal “is to help prepare today’s students for the real world of tomorrow, to help each child reach his or her full potential,” she added. Vedoe said Apple wants to know whether they’re on the right track and offered an e-mail address for comments.
Vedoe was hired less than two weeks after Apple’s poor sales results in the education sector were partially blamed on a change from independent dealer sales agents to Apple-corporate sales in early July. In addressing the situation, Jobs said he felt the main problem was due to an ill-timed change in the way educational sales are handled.
Before July 2000, Apple educational sales were handled with a combination of Apple personnel and third party sales reps. That changed when Apple terminated the third party reps to bring everything in-house.
“While doing this may have been smart, the timing wasn’t,” Jobs said. “Our disappointing educational sales for the fourth quarter seem to be primarily caused by the sales force transition.”
During the change, 40 percent of the sales reps were new to Apple. What’s more, about half of the company’s educational customers had new reps, Jobs said. That won’t be a problem next time around, he added.
Jobs made it clear when fourth quarter results were announced October 18 that the company made poorly timed decisions on the switch and that “the next big education sales quarter begins in April, and we intend to be ready to start regaining market share.”
According to Dataquest Gartner Group, Dell is now the market leader with 15.1 percent of the educational sales market with Apple dropping to the number two spot with 12.5 percent.