Kids that grow up using a particular flavor of tech tend to take it with them into the workforce. That’s why Microsoft offers schools all kinds of discounts and both Microsoft and Google give schools free access to their respective clouds, Office 365 and Google Apps.
That’s also why this is a statistic that should deeply scare Microsoft: About 22% of the school districts in the U.S. are now using Google Chromebooks. That’s over 5,000 K-12 schools, Caesar Sengupta, vice president of product management for Chromebooks told Business Insider. (Sengupta was one of the original Chromebook team members, starting it in his free time as a "20-percent" project.)
Chromebooks are the cloud-based notebooks that run Chrome OS as the operating system.
"We are heavily investing in Chromebooks," Sengupta told us. "There’s two different segments we care a lot about: consumers … and K-12 schools."