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.
