In the war over who owns the future of the PC, there is one super important battleground: schools.

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."

Sengupta is pleased with its progress so far with both groups. He points to a report by NPD Group from last week which says that in just a year, Chromebooks went from negligible share in the back-to-school PC market to 3%.

Google sold 175,000 units in the 10 weeks of June 30- Sept. 7, NPD analyst Stephen Baker found with Chromebooks providing "all the growth" in a lackluster market hurt by tablets. Overall PC sales declined 2.5% from the 2012 back-to-school period.

To be fair, Windows still sold the lion's share, commanding 58% of the market (compared to almost 61% in the year-ago period) and Macs held on to 20%, NPD says.

So Sengupta knows there's still work to do and he's working on it. HP, Toshiba, Acer, Asus all announced new Chromebooks last month using Intel's new Haswell chip, priced at about $300 and available for the holiday season. Haswell promises fast performance and very long battery life.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-percent-us-school-districts-use-chromebooks-2013-10#ixzz2gly1putD

Yes, true.

I wonder how you'd react if someone would tell you that in a thread you made about WP now in use by 5% of the german market?

Not entirely. Apple has a grant program and gives out macs to certain high schools. I know my siblings school was a part of that program and they all had their own macs starting at 5th grade.

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=5527192

As someone who has done practicums and Student Teaching (so far) at three different schools, I can say that I have seen a LOT of Chromebooks being used (as well as Ipads). I don't really see many imacs or macbooks anymore. There is also a lot of regular desktop pc's and laptops I've seen too but yes the Chromebook seems to be pretty popular right now as does the ipad.

Hmm a good Google thread and u come in with some M$ pr. Even though I'm a pc person all the way, chromebooks are the best allaround for price and intuitiveness for schools from what I've seen. Still office 365 is my preferred choice.

If you say so. 

Either way, my post wasn't 100% serious. I just enjoy seeing that when Dallas makes a pro Google thread you come in to shoot it down and he does the same exact thing in pro MS threads.

Usually, even in predominantly Mac environments, there's a copy of Windows lurking around somewhere. Perhaps on a server or a virtual machine.

His point is that the stat is misleading. kowen's 100% figure might even be accurate, but that wouldn't mean Microsoft has total control of the education market.

Similarly we see a headline boasting about 22%, when the article admits ChromeOS's real share is actually 3%. Just because one in five schools have deployed a trial Chromebook lab doesn't mean Google's now a big playa in educational platforms. It just means that schools have been given enough subsidies and promises that they're willing to test the waters.

It's is actually just 1 in 5 districts. For that statistic they probably only need 1 or more schools in  a said district to include that district in their %.

I think that the point is that the Chromebook platform is growing.

And this is something that is going to be a thron in MSFT's side any way you look at it, as with every Chromebook sold, MSFT loses a chance to sell not only Windows, but also its biggest cash cow: Office.  It will also sell other miscellaneous software packages. 

It all goes through Windows, and this interupts that opportunity. 

Chromebooks, in short, are a big deal and represent a lot of money that MSFT can't get to.