ANGEL is a private company and was purchased for 95 million dollars.   The deal is expected to close this month.  Blackboard is also involved in an ongoing legal brawl with one of the other main players in the LMS market, Desire 2 Learn.  If Desire 2 Learn were to crumble under Blackboards legal pressure it would leave the open source product, Moodle as one of the only strong options outside of Blackboard.

The anti-trust problems of Microsoft come to mind when I look at this shift in the LMS market.  With a community based LMS possibly being the only competition left for blackboard, could the feds get involved?   Unfortunately for consumers, this means fewer options in the LMS market and most likely less innovation.

I must take a moment to express my distaste for this merger.  I believe that competition fuels inovation and it frustrates me to see Blackboard taking such an aggressive tone in buying or suing other companies.  Just think if blackboard used the 95 million dollars that they spent on ANGEL to improve their own product.  If that were the case we could see some really compelling products.  At the same time I am disappointed that ANGEL has decided to sell their company to Blackboard.  ANGEL ,and it’s user base, has always prided itself on being agile and innovative, something that is about as far from Blackboard as anything.  From my perspective ANGEL has lost sight of it’s users and joined ranks of the “Big Corporations.”

One outcome that is possible from all of this, is the death of what we think of as an LMS.  Many people have been pointing to this for some time and the lack of options in the LMS world might be one major factor in bringing that to fruition.   This combined with that fact that educators are getting more and more comfortable with using technology, we may see more and more mashups of different tools to create an LMS instead of a monolithic system.

Another possibility is that another major company will step in with a new product.  For example google could expand their apps for education to include LMS like functionality, or Apple could expand ItunesU to a complete LMS.

Whatever the case, those who watch the LMS market should be in for a wild ride in the next few months and years.