When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella helped introduced Windows 10 S last week, he related a tear-inducing story of how much technology could help poor kids learn in the modern world, citing his own youth in India. That’s effective for getting media attention, but not so much for succeeding in the market.

After struggling for nearly a decade, Google’s Chrome OS recently has begun picking up traction in schools, so of course that’s the new battlefront for technology pundits. The theory is that whoever wins the school wins the next generation. That’s provably false: Apple “owned” the education market in the 1980s but never owned the mass market, and IBM “owned” the education market in the 1990s but only very briefly owned the mass market.

Education is not a market—it’s a charity case. Google’s Chromebooks are very cheap and very limited (so they’re easier to manage by teachers and students in the typical IT-less school). That’s great for schools, which are often underfunded and deprived of needed resources. I applaud any company that helps out such schools.

But Windows 10 S is no Chrome OS. Although simpler than regular Windows 10, it’s still sophisticated, somewhere between the complexity of an iPad and a Mac. I’ve heard plenty of school administrators say that iPads are too involved to manage in school settings, so I don’t see how Windows 10 S will really get traction beyond resource-rich schools or those that Microsoft itself adopts for technology management to serve as marketing showcases.