By Christopher Dawson, Forbes
Is this a major play for market share, a genuine effort to promote development and cross-pollination in the LMS market, or a bit of both? Blackboard announced the acquisition of both Moodlerooms and Netspot, along with the creation of a new “Open Source Services Group“, headed by none other than Charles Severance, founding Chief Architect of the Sakai Project. Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure (maker of the Canvas LMS; many outside of the ed tech space may remember him as the founder of Mozy) characteristically didn’t pull any punches, telling me Monday night that, It looks like Blackboard is giving up on innovation and instead is focused on commoditizing the LMS. Moodle, Sakai, Angel, BB 9.1 – it’s all the same to them now. They want to make their money by offering generic IT service and software. Given Blackboard’s decline in LMS market share, I suppose it’s the only option they had.
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