Bring on Android for Ed Tech!
Fellow ZDNet blogger, Dana Blankenhorn, asked an interesting this morning: "Will Google Android Wreck Ubuntu?" At least in the land of educational technology, though, I think that Android has the potential to break Windows strongholds, opening doors for Ubuntu and other distros that they simply couldn't open by themselves.
At the risk of sounding like a PR geek, the best line in Dana's post related to branding:
It could also be that this is about marketing, not technology. Google has a lot of marketing muscle, and a strong brand name. Ubuntu has neither.
He's right. Ubuntu has a very strong following among techies, but everybody uses Google. No matter how much teachers' eyes glaze over when I start talking about saving money on netbooks by using Linux, everyone has been enthusiastic about our moves into cloud computing with Google Apps this summer. Sure, some of them know that Google can monetize our immortal souls, but their products rock out loud so much that most teachers are willing to overlook that.
So what happens when suddenly netbooks are available with Google's own operating system? Notice that Google doesn't actually call it Linux, even though it is. It's Android. There's some more branding for you and there's the catalyst for a large swath of people to realize that a computer doesn't need to run Windows. Many of our teachers are already realizing (often via their students) that their computers don't need to run Microsoft Office. OpenOffice or Google Docs will do them just fine.
I say to HP and the other folks considering Android in their netbooks, "Bring it on!" The more choices we can have in Ed Tech, the less resistance to change, and the lower the costs, the happier I am.
Android isn't going to kill Ubuntu on netbooks. It just might help rebrand Linux, not to mention increasing competition in this segment among both software and hardware vendors. I certainly know that it will make Linux netbooks and easier sell.
I was struck by the potential for Google's brand to make Linux in general (not just Android Linux) far more acceptable on netbooks. In fact, particularly in the relatively conservative (at least in terms of tech) world of education, resistance to Linux can be fairly strong.