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About 4-in-10 (40.84%) postsecondary institutions use Microsoft’s cloud based e-mail service (Office 365).
In comparison, about 2-in-10 (18.31%) are e-mail clouding with Google (gSuite).
These percentages were derived from research done Jim Siegl, who was responding to a piece that I wrote about Google and higher ed.
You can read Jim’s analysis here, and check out his methodology in an earlier (K-12 focused) post.
A couple thoughts about all this.
First, it is interesting (and somewhat surprising) that Microsoft still seems to so thoroughly dominate the higher ed enterprise productivity tools space.
E-mail is only part of this story. Everyone in higher ed that I know still uses MS Office, and every school I know still licenses some variation of the Office Suite.
Microsoft’s cloud based e-mail numbers understate Microsoft’s continued e-mail / productivity higher ed hegemony. The two-to-one lead that Microsoft apparently has in cloud based e-mail does not account for the proportion of schools that still use on-premises Exchange.
Does anybody know the numbers for Microsoft’s total higher ed e-mail / productivity tools market share?
Are you also fascinated by the discrepancy between Microsoft’s higher ed software market share, and Microsoft’s higher ed mindshare?
Google has huge higher ed mindshare, but lower market share than Microsoft in the productivity tools (e-mail, word processing, presentation and spreadsheet software) that we use every day.
Why hasn't Microsoft been able to translate its higher ed enterprise / productivity footprint into great higher ed brand relevance?
For that matter, has the Google cloud productivity revolution stalled?
Jim points out that almost a third of schools look like they started the process of moving towards Google cloud e-mail (or were once on that service). I would have guessed that the Microsoft/Google e-mail higher ed enterprise cloud numbers would have been more equal.
The last point that I want to make is about our edtech conversation.
How great is it that Jim saw my post, did the work to do the analysis, and then wrote-up his results for all of us to see?
An academic discipline is a conversation - and I’d say that our edtech conversation is rich and vibrant.
The question of whether our edtech academic conversation is more inclusive than traditional disciplinary conversations is an interesting one.
Does the fact that so much of our edtech academic discussion takes place over free-and-open social media platforms (if ad supported platforms) mean that our dialog is more inclusive?
I don’t know Jim personally, but I am deeply grateful to have him as an edtech colleague.
Do you have any further questions, insights, or thoughts about Google, Microsoft, and higher ed?
How do you participate in, and contribute to, our larger academic edtech conversation?
