Well, if you are not on Twitter, you can be forgiven (perhaps) for not seeing the flood of “OMG BB bought both Wimba and Elluminate!” tweets as Blackboard averse edtechers start to run for the hills as the franken system to be known as Blackboard Collaborate rises.
So for those who are not already sitting firmly in one camp or another, I will offer some ideas as to what I think of this deal. First, I think it was only a matter of time before one of the two synchronous solutions got sucked up by either Adobe or Cisco. Why those two? Well, it seemed to me that even though they both have solid solutions in Enterprise, they might want to pick up some cheap technology from one of these two education centric companies. Elluminate was starting to get long in the tooth in terms of looks (though, it did what it needed to do well and could do so on almost any screen and on any pipe). Wimba, though I had limited experience with it seemed to be wanting to do more than the virtual classroom through its suite of collaboration tools. BB, well to say that it has collaboration tools is to be well… (waiting for the BB lawyers to pop up) wearing special spectacles.
Feeling that something like this was imminent, am I surprised with the BB take over? Well yes in that I didn’t think that they would have beat anyone else to the punch (or maybe I was wrong in thinking that Adobe et al wanted to buy up some IP), but no in another way. That way being that BB is a ever increasing monolith in the edtech space and as competition from the likes of Moodle grow in the traditional asynchronous tool space, the synchronous space was one where many institutions were sitting quite happy, some perhaps even thinking of dropping the static component of their LMS in favour of the dynamic. This is what I think might have scared BB into action.
BB has announced over the past year that many of it’s acquired “projects” will EOL within the next few years (Vista Jan 2013, Campus Oct 2012), so institutions are looking at their options as to staying in the BB family or going elsewhere like Desire2Learn or Moodle. Very few of these organizations are considering similar moves within the same time frame with respect to their collaboration/synchronous systems. So BB might have really just been buying some time and money to recoup some losses on the LMS front. And even more interesting is that Collaborate will sit as a standalone product (though for how long?) that will continue to connect with other systems. It seems that the rumblings that were about with regards to BBNextGen being an OS for the LMS may indeed come to light…
Please remember that these are thoughts from the sideline and are about as informed as the next blogger out there who also sits on the sides and watches the ebb and flow of technology. I may be right, but I may be wrong, either way, I think we are in for another interesting round of BB apologetics. And, I do wonder how long it will be before BB buys into the Sakai Foundation and starts playing some cards in the Open Source world (’cause you know, they can host Moodle and the like already). Maybe they will go just nuts and buy up WordPress while they are at it… now where is that bigbluebutton I was looking for…
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