Amplify Tablet

» see amplify.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

News Corp went into education in 2010 and hired Joel Klein, who had just spent eight years running the New York City school system, to lead it. The unit was named Amplify. Its thesis was that American K-12 was an enormous market running on paper, and that whoever arrived with a working digital stack would own it. There was a curriculum business and an assessment business under the same roof, but the device is the piece everyone remembers.

Joel Klein unveiled the Amplify Tablet at SXSWedu in Austin on 6 March 2013. Ten-inch screen, Android 4.2, a hardened case, $299 with a two-year subscription at $99 a year, and a version with a data plan for more. It was not a general-purpose tablet with an education skin on top. The whole software layer was built for a teacher standing at the front of a room, with a dashboard that showed who had stopped paying attention and a lock that put every screen in the class on the same page at once.

The idea was not stupid and it was not new. One Laptop Per Child had already spent a decade proving how hard the hardware end of it is. What made Amplify different was that it was a Murdoch company selling to public school boards, which meant every problem it had would be a local news story before it was a product decision.

~ the case file ~

~ guilford county ~

Guilford County Schools in North Carolina signed a three-year, $16.8 million contract and became the flagship, distributing 15,450 tablets to middle school students and staff for the 2013-14 year. It went wrong almost immediately. By October roughly 1,500 screens had cracked, and a charger overheated badly enough to be described as melted. The superintendent recalled the hardware from every school and suspended the program.

Amplify absorbed millions in losses to keep the contract alive, redesigned the case, and ran a pilot again the following year that went considerably better. Guilford stayed the biggest tablet customer the company had, which says less about how well the second attempt went than about how few other districts had signed up. The partnership ended for good at the close of the 2015-16 school year.

~ the write-down ~

On 12 August 2015 News Corp reported its fiscal fourth quarter and took a $371 million non-cash impairment charge against Amplify. In the same breath it said it would wind the tablet business down. No new customers would be taken on, and the districts already holding devices would be supported until their contracts ran out. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Robert Thomson told the call the company was in advanced negotiations to sell what remained of the education arm, and by the end of September it had gone to a management group backed by private investors, with Laurene Powell Jobs among the buyers.

Amplify the company is still trading in 2026 and does well selling curriculum. It sells no hardware at all.

~ turkey ran the same experiment ~

Turkey was doing this at the same time and at a scale no American district approached. The FATİH project, run by the Ministry of Education, piloted in 52 schools across 17 provinces in the 2011-12 year and had put something like 730,000 tablets into students' and teachers' hands by the end of 2014, against a stated ambition of ten million. I was thirty and long out of school, so I read about it the way I read about Guilford County: in the news, and the recurring details were the same ones. Hardware that arrives before the content it is supposed to carry, sitting in a school that is still waiting on a network somebody budgeted separately.

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