Chapotraphouse

I blame Google and Apples bid to dominate the K12 market. Windows devices, like laptops, around 15 years ago were just trash. If you had a classroom set of laptops you would spend a shitload of time and money trying to keep these things from grinding to a halt under the stress of windows updates on 27 devices hitting a single AP after being offline and asleep for a week.

That was my experience with managing the damn things. Teachers hated them because they took forever to boot, and when they did boot they took forever to sign in, and when they did sign in they would start pulling and installing windows updates, which made people use them less, which only made the issues worse.

Then the Chromebook came out, along with Gsuite. We switched from Exchange to Gmail that year and replaced the Windows Laptops with Chromebooks. Eventually that lead to more Chromebooks, and less time in computer labs. Eventually that lead to the removal of computer labs. Then with COVID all the grants allowed us to impellent a 1:1 program where kids are now assigned a device from 2nd grade till graduation with a replacement cycle when they promote between elementary, middle, and highschool.

This has lead to a total collapse in "computing" classes, "keyboard" classes, etc. Kids still get taught keyboarding, but its very different and mostly handled by something like TypingClub. Googles Drive and associated apps have almost completely replaced Office. Google offered all this, Enterprise Email, Collaborative Doc editing, UNLIMITED storage in Google Drive, Unified control of Chrome across all platforms with Gsuite, for FREE for at least a decade. Well before Microsoft ever could have.

Drive has robust searching and suggestions such that there is almost no reason to organize your files. In most cases it assumes you want new files in the root of drive. The same is true for Gmail and with nearly unlimited storage. You can "label" emails but they're never "organized" into folders. Breaking teachers of their concepts of "folders" from exchange and teaching them that emails are just "in your account" is an ongoing process but only for older generations of teachers.

The result is that kids have no concept of "drives" or even "folders" or why you would need to even organize your files into folders. Drive doesn't care where your files are. Shared files are just there, in your "shared with me" section until YOU decide to move them into the "My Drive" category. In the last couple of years I had to implement am archiving protocol in the department that ensures critical drive files and folders are properly transferred to new accounts because we had people loose those documents when staff retire. This is because of changes on googles end regarding license. When an account is suspended now, access to shared docs are lost. This caused massive headaches as people discovered their critical documents were owned by long retired users and had no idea. Leaving us to try and find them.

All that to say, no one knows who owns their files and where they even exist or originated from under Google's framework.

Most of these issues are replicated on iPads, but they have such a smaller slice of the market that they're hardly to blame. They are simply replicating the market leader.

The free services paired with incredibly cheap devices lead to massive market share of the edu market for Google that no one has shaken. Devices have become more and more designed for the least technical person, where they used to be exclusively designed for technical people. They're designed now for the least friction. Design of modern device OS is geared to make the "device" disappeare behind the slick UI design patterns which make saving and finding files simple, make turning off aspects of the device a click, and installing software nearly fool proof.

Its consumer focused design as opposed to designing devices for technical, research, or general scientific uses.