If something is repeatedly happening (restaurants have bad sites, enterprise software is crap, education software is ugly..), it might be worth digging a little deeper and understanding why. If something is perplexingly broken, there is slightly harder to find reason why. That's why it's perplexing.
Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger another why.
If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to suck. There was a reason.
Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.
From what I've seen, Blackboard (the company) spends a lot of effort suing competitors to kept them out of the market. They have a bucket load of patents they're quite happy to wield in order to protect their turf
A bigger issue is that Blackboard keeps buying competitors. Without competition, there's not a lot of incentive to keep your product cutting-edge.
Blackboard bought my startup in 2001, and I worked there for about a year after. After they bought our company, our product was discontinued and our unique perspective was lost. The remaining employees were integrated into Blackboard's existing teams. Some of them have become excellent leaders at Blackboard, but after the acquisition they were advancing Blackboard's vision, not our vision.
WebCT was the only other large competitor in this market, and Blackboard used its IPO cash to acquire them in early 2006. Together Blackboard and WebCT had over 80% of the market, maybe closer to 90%.
Plus there's the traditional enterprise software problem: when the buyer is not the end user, product skew happens. When IT staff evaluate software alternatives, they're looking for IT features, like LDAP support or integration with a student records system. They know the end users need certain features like "a homework dropbox," but they're not able to evaluate the subtleties of those features. The IT department can't be as familiar with those subtleties as the end users are. And it's rare that an IT department would study internal users in depth, like a product designer would.
Absolutely. It's extremely tough to build a customer base in education, but once you've signed them they're just as reluctant to move on to a competitor. Standard practice is for the larger companies like Blackboard and Pearson to gobble up the smaller fish and either shut down their products or milk them dry. There's very little incentive to invest in product development when no one in the ecosystem experiences much competitive pressure.
It's not really much more than the patents. People tell people that Blackboard will sue them because BB has patents and has sued others before.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of other companies that sue competitors instead of trying to compete with them. I mean, one such company is currently in the #1 spot on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2081938 Need I list more?
Can they still sue a company that is based outside of the USA? I always wondered this, but never found an answer.
Europe, for example, does not have software patents, but I think that is more complicated than this.
Groupon, can't get groupon.com.au because an Australian guy registered the domain and trademark. Not only can you compete with Blackboard, but if you registered blackboard.com.foo and sold competing software, they would have no recourse in certain jurisdictions.
Well, the domain actually had chalk in it. Anyway, being from Australia I actually just ignored it. If they wanted to bring a charge against me and my product they need to do it in my jurisdiction and, worse, the domain name was from the Italian registry, and they would have even more trouble with their claim there.
There claim was spurious anyway, just because they have trademarks on the 'Blackboard' (a generic term anyway) regarding education software, doesn't mean they have a claim to the word 'Chalk' for non-educational software. Blackboard just have over-active lawyers.
I recently started working in this sector, and I was shocked at the (poor) quality of its software.
I think I've identified a few causes:
1. Design by committee
2. Winners are determined by relationships and lock-in
3. Educators don't care about finding the best, just good enough
4. Great developers don't want to work in this sector
The first should be obvious. Anything run by government tends towards design by committee, and educational software almost tries to be bad in this way.
The second is true of other sectors, but it is especially true in education. Intermediate Units (I work in PA) and school districts don't try to work together by default. Even at the top, deals are done by who knows who or who hates who. And, the enormous cost of switching products for the large systems creates a lock-in environment. People will say/promise anything to get a sale, because they know they will really have to screw up to lose customers.
Third, educators as a rule are afraid of technology or are at least more unaware than anyone here on HN. They don't want to spend the time to learn; they want to spend whatever it takes to get the problem off their plate. Remember, there are a great deal of people who went into education because of the vacation time. Some people really care and work hard, but the percentage is lower than other industries, I think.
Finally, for all the reasons above, the greatest developers don't want to work in education. The bosses are almost never developers; winners aren't determined by quality; most code is CRUD type code with lots of rules and exceptions from state law/procedure.
I get excited at the thought of change, which is why I stay. I want to be part of that change. But, on the low days change seems impossible, and I start thinking about other jobs.
One side note: why isn't there more OS in education? This really bothers me, as it seems like a perfect scenario for it. I'm thinking it goes back to points #2 and #3. People want to pay for something now rather than funding something everyone shares. If I could be part of the change in one way, this would be it (I'm looking for ways now).
EDIT: One more: pay. Because most code is crud code, and because bosses aren't developers who can discern good from bad code, the perception is developers should be paid like teachers (or worse). Not going to attract the great developers that way. In the long run, all these software costs more to develop as a result of not hiring the best, but non-developer bosses can't understand that.
You're absolutely correct, and the answer to the second 'why' is that the sales process in education is unbelievably long and expensive relative to what the customers are willing to pay for software.
I worked for an education startup between 2003 and 2006 that made a learning management system similar to the OP. We also laughed at the terrible UI and outdated technology used by our competitors. Little did we know...
The problem is that you only have two choices in education. You can try marketing to individual teachers using Adwords or the like, but there aren't many teachers who want to spend their own money on classroom tools. Districts aren't keen on it, either. This is strictly microISV territory.
The other alternative is to market directly to school districts or universities. That means you need expensive sales reps and money to burn on travel budgets, trade shows, etc. The sales cycle takes about a year, even for the smallest customer. Your customers are the administrators on the purchasing committee, not teachers or students. The admins are far more concerned with back-office functionality like tracking attendance or whether teachers are following the curriculum than the quality of the UI. In fact, the UI was basically irrelevant so long as it was physically possible to do everything on their list of requirements.
Educators make it extremely expensive to provide them with software. But they don't have deep pockets either, so the margins for software developers are extremely tight. There are no competitive pressures in education. Districts are perfectly happy to use obsolete technology indefinitely. There are still thousands of schools using applications based on Access, Foxpro, and DBase IV. (seriously!) The only thing in your favor is that once you sign a customer, they are extremely reluctant to move to a competitor regardless of how outdated your product becomes.
Thus, the standard business model in education is for the large players like Pearson or Blackboard to gobble up small independent companies with locked-in customer bases built up over many years, cut investment in new development to a minimum, and milk the products until they're unviable.
TL;DR: The people buying educational software don't care and won't pay for good UI.
Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger another why.
If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to suck. There was a reason.
Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.