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Blackboard Vows To Press On
An interview with Blackboard Chief Legal Officer Matthew Small
4/2/2008
There were no enterprise course management systems at the time, and we came out with the very first one. And it was received very well by the market. It kind of swept the market. The next best system at the time was WebCT. We had CourseInfo 1.5; they had WebCT 1.0. We came out with CourseInfo 2.0. It had this invention in it, and it was very popular. That's one of the things people look at when they're evaluating obviousness: commercial success. Well, if it was that obvious, why wasn't everyone doing it? In fact no one was.
Nagel: I wasn't around at the time. CourseInfo 2.0?
Small: ... The predecessor product to the Blackboard Learning System was CourseInfo. CourseInfo was the name of the company founded by a group of students at Cornell that merged with Blackboard in 1998. Their product became the Blackboard product. That product was like he other ones on the market: Each class was an island unto itself.
We stepped back and re-architected the whole thing so it could be scalable. School administrators were struggling with the number of online accounts or identities for the same student, multiple passwords. It just wasn't scalable. You wouldn't know, for example, if David Nagel [were in certain] classes by just looking up your name because you might have five different user names and five different passwords. And it was also inconvenient for you, as the user, to have to log in at different times and memorize those passwords.
At the time, it was very difficult. People were typing in long, complicated HTML addresses because we didn't have the browser functionality or the Web 2.0 capabilities that we have today. This was a very convenient thing for people. They could go to one page, log on one time, and then have access to all their courses, whether they were an instructor, a student, a teaching assistant, a course builder, a grader, or what have you.
The LMS Market Present
Nagel: Let me ask you this: Blackboard has something like 90 percent of the commercial LMS market share, right?
Small: I wouldn't put the number that high.
Nagel: How would you ballpark it? Higher than 75 percent? Higher than 80 percent? I just mean commercial.
Small: Of post-secondary universities in the United States using a commercial, i.e. non-open source, course management product it is probably between 70 [percent] and 80 percent.
Nagel: Do you know what your breakdown is of your market share between K-12 and higher ed? Just of your own customers.
Small: In the United States, we have about [1,915] colleges and universities and about [388] K-12 districts.
Nagel. All right. That's a pretty enormous market share, and you achieved it without the patent being in effect, so how significant would it be if the patent were eventually completely rejected? I know you're not expecting it to be, but how significant would it be if that did happen?
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