Amazon Inspire steals a march in the back-to- school season
Jeff Bezos' company has launched its educational platform Amazon Inspire. The giant with the yellow arrow thus enters the fray in the battle that has been waged for some years by Apple, Windows and Google to bring technology to schools.
Up to 5 billion dollars was declared last academic year as technology expenses (tablets, laptops or desktops) by public schools in the U.S. This huge figure only covers hardware, where the competition has been between Apple, Windows and Google, with the latter's Chromebook as one of the big winners.
Up to five million of the Google laptops were bought last year by the U.S. public education system. But it was Apple that received most of the money invested, given the higher price of its products.
On the software front, the figure spent soars to 8 billion dollars per year, but in this case the race is at a much more embryonic stage. The digital adventure of the U.S. educational system has barely begun. There are no great operations that have tried to gain a foothold in the market; and there are very few initiatives such as the Manhattan-based teacherspayteachers.com, whose user base is estimated at two million teachers.
This is the context in which Amazon has launched its platform Amazon Inspire. It is a marketplace of educational content – some free - that can be downloaded and customized, with an offer of study and lesson plans put at tens of thousands. It was launched during ISTE, an annual international conference on educational technology. There is no doubt it is a good move by the digital giant headed by Jeff Bezos.