I just had to use this Stephen Downes' quote from yesterday's OLDaily as the basis of this short Auricle article. Stephen hits the nail on the head when he challenges the Motley Fool's contention that 'lock in' to Blackboard's products is a 'good thing' (from an investor perspective).
“Oh, I know, investors leap at lock-in like slathering dogs for a hanging beeksteak, but to me when such a huge impediment as this is depicted as “great” it simply reminds me of the impoverished ethic of the business investor.” The Motley Fool for the uninitiated is an investors' site which describes it's mission as:
“to educate, enrich and amuse individual investors around the world.”
Here's the killer quote from the Motley Fool article Blackboard's Screetching IPO (24 June 2004).
“Another great characteristic of the business is that there are significant costs to switching from one software package to another. Faculty and system administrators have to learn how to use and maintain the new system. Then, all content that was generated for the previous system, including syllabi, documents, assignments, and test questions, would have to be migrated to the new system. Since such a migration is typically a complicated and tedious task, customers have considerable motivation to stick with a given solution. Consequently, Blackboard has a nice moat against competitors and the potential to raise prices as the product becomes indispensable to customers.”
Several Auricle articles have attempted to raise this important issue: E-Learning: challenges to the neo-conservative model? and E-Learning Flexible Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late? and Portal or VLE?. The Motley Fool article is merely being explicit about the type of discussions which normally take place behind vendor's closed doors.
Read the Motley Fool article and reflect.
Let's not say we weren't warned.
