I agree that’s what the OP is asking about, but Dell and Apple’s dominance goes beyond bulk purchases. I work for a state university, and when I buy a computer for my office (using my grant money), I have to go through a bidding process. But Dell and Apple have “open bids” in place, which basically means they’ve already won the bid to supply computers with certain specs. I can just pick one of them and have it ordered immediately. If I want something other than Dell or Apple, I have to write a very detailed set of specs, solicit (and wait for) bids and buy from the lowest bidder.
This is actually stricter than what the federal government requires. Government institutions can buy anything up to $3000 without soliciting bids.
I don’t think there’s much difference between those open bids and a bulk purchase. In both cases, the system specs and the discounted price have been negotiated in advance. In the case of a bulk purchase, 100 systems might be sold in one order, while in the case of the open bid, 100 systems might be sold in 100 orders throughout the year to various parties within the university.
For the government, it’s because Dell can say they’re made in a TAA compliant county (US, not China), which weighs heavily. Plus, their deals are second to none. For less than an HP without a warranty, I can get a decent enough PC and a 3 years’ warranty on it.
Wow, I’m pretty shocked by the rate at which the percentage of Macs appears to have grown in the last 7 years (based on that “Operating Systems” chart). I know that’s data from just one school, but still . . . .
For those who asked, and for others, I intended the term “on-site” to refer to institutional purchases (i.e. when the school or company is buying them for use in the organization), rather than personal boxes that people physically bring onto the premises.
Solaris is still a huge workhorse for Industry. It has always a been a favorite of enterprise Oracle databases, and with the acquisition I doubt it will go away soon.
Dell has onsite next-day replacement that is standard for most of their large contracts. That makes a big difference when computers do fail. Paying an employee to do nothing for a day is pretty expensive.
Things are beginning to change. A lot of companies I’ve worked for have stopped offering desktop computers and are now just telling employees to bring their own.
Of course, most of these are programming companies. They use to provide desktop computers for their employees, but their employees never used them and instead bring in their laptops. These companies still provide monitors, so you can have a bigger screen or dual monitors.
Banks and large financial institutions are Windows oriented shops and are so damn closed. I can’t even get Gmail from the bank I work at and most of the technical email lists are on my Gmail account. Dropbox is also verboten for “security reasons”. Yet, they’ve standardized on Windows XP and IE 6.0. Yeah, that’s secure!
Heck, the bank even locked down my Windows taskbar and desktop background.
It seems like there are two conversations going on, one is about what computer individual college students are buying and the other is about academic and other institutions are buying. The OP seemed to be talking about what schools were buying to stock computer labs, not what students were buying for their personal use.