Blackboard-Inc.

I have often said that, if you want to understand the likely future behavior of a publicly traded company, the best way to approach it is to think of it as a complex money-making machine. If you can understand how the machine works, then you can make reasonable guesses as to how it will behave under different circumstances and the degree to which that behavior is likely to help or hurt your interests.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing about Blackboard’s announced acquisitions of Wimba and Elluminate. Let’s look at the facts.

All lawsuits have been dropped by both sides. The companies will cross-license each others’ patent portfolios under undisclosed terms, which gives both companies an opportunity to save face. After three and a half years, higher education can move on. Left unresolved is the larger question of the role of patents in higher education, but that is at least as much a question for the universities as it is for the vendors.

For now, though, I’m just happy it’s over.

According to Scott Rosenbaum, a business intelligence consultant, Blackboard has given him permission to contribute code back back to the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project (or, more accurately, they are contributing the code as separate open source projects that can be “used by the community”).

Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification.

Jeff Young has a great piece in The Chronicle??called “Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives“. As usual, Michael Korcuska has insightful things to say about it. I only have a little bit to add on one quote from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen:

I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services???I don???t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai.