Sam Adkins discusses the perils of being an LMS vendor in Learning Circuits.
Free is a hard price to beat. Gateway is now giving the LMS service away if you subscribe to their content. This is a sure sign that LMS technology is now a commodity and vendors are competing solely on price. That is bad news for vendors without deep pockets or cash stockpiles. When vendors compete solely on price they start a brushfire of burning cash. The goal is to outlast your rivals. Those left standing will then have pricing power and can start edging the prices up.
Adkins also talks about the rising threat of patent lawsuits – which only those with lots of money will be able to fight. It will be interesting to see what happens with open source learning platforms, and whether patent suits will be launched against the more successful ones. This may be a bit more difficult from a legal perspective though. Who would you sue? Do they have any money? Using open source, and having free and clear title to use the software, may be the best option to avoid some of these legal/patent issues. Any lawyers out there want to comment?
Integration is the keyI think the whole issue comes down to what we mean by ‘LMS’. Based on my work with organisations in the UK, integrated systems offering :
Training Administration
Alerts (eg when refresher training is due)
Access to e-learning
Personal Development Planning
such as the Consensus LMS : http://www.consensus.co.uk – can genuinely add value to an organisation. Old-style LMS offerings which simply organised e-learning activities, with little or no relationship to othera spects of learning and development, are indeed facing tough times.
Thanks for your comment, butThanks for your comment, but this comes pretty close to shameless vendor self-promotion. Various LMS and LCMS offer the integrated systems that you mention – even open source systems.