Ch-Ch-Changes

Apple makes computers and iPods. To make the computers valuable and worth people's money, they make software. To help sell iPods, Apple sells music.

Pearson does a lot of things, so many things, it might make your head spin. Broadly, they're about making you smarter. (I should propose as a new slogan: "We can't make you smart, but we can make you smarter."). Pearson has three divisions:

• The Penguin book group, home of the famed Penguin classics,
• The Financial Times, which attempts to explain global capitalism to you, and, our new friend,
• Pearson Education. You're a bright person, I'll let you guess what Pearson Education is about.

PowerSchool makes software that schools and school districts use to manage their student's information. Hence the phrase Student Information System. Scheduling, attendance, grades, etc. You use a web browser to use most parts of the program. In 1997, when PowerSchool began, that was revolutionary. Today, it's prosaic.

Apple bought PowerSchool from its founder and initial investors just 5 years ago, about 6 months before the first iPod was released. At the time, one might suppose, Apple was interested in stemming their decline in education sales.

We learned last week that Pearson has purchased PowerSchool from Apple.

If you are a geek working at PowerSchool, you might be less than thrilled about exchanging your employee discount on iPods for a discount on the complete set of Penguin Classics. However, you might be thrilled for the product. Since PowerSchool has nothing to do with selling iPods and very little to do with selling computers (it's cross-platform, running equally well on Macs and Windows boxes), it didn't make much sense to be part of Apple's product line. But Pearson Education is all about what PowerSchool is all about. It looks, to me, like a good match.