Clients furious, but shareholders must be thrilled

Blackboard has announced a 32 percent jump in second-quarter revenue over last year, pulling in a whopping USD 13.6 million. A Washington Times article makes no mention of the patent or legal action against Desire2Learn that has clients up in arms and legal council Matthew Small doing damage control on a teleconference with Australian clients from a maternity ward while his wife is in labour. The article does describe why many institutions will stick with Bb, despite the company's corporate ethics.

"As long as the industry trends continue, there will be more use of online learning on campus," she said. "So long as that is true, the switching costs are high enough for the universities ... they'd rather just stick with their current vendor."

Having nearly completed a uni-wide Blackboard roll-out, I understand now more than ever the effort involved in fostering adoption of a platform so embedded into teaching and learning activities. Switching is hard. Not so much from a technical perspective but from an organisational change perspective. That said, I'll be interested to see if this figure changes over the coming year:

During the second quarter, Blackboard had a software-license renewal rate of more than 90 percent.