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Comment by falien | Hacker News Reader

Google has the engineers and the legal department to take on Blackboard. If they took 6 months for a dev team with this as their primary task and were willing to have actual tech support they could demolish blackboard with a single sales rep in 5 years.

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  single sales rep in 5 years.

That's what google thinks about sales and that's why they keep getting it wrong. They thought for the longest time they can get away with dealing with big ad agencies without having an office and sales folks in NYC. Luckily they realized that wouldn't work.

Look, a great consumer product like google.com can spread virally. But enterprise requires a very focused and elaborate sales effort.

While I agree in general, my point is that this market is an exception (at least in the US, I have no idea what the situation is like in other countries). Universities are dying for an alternative to Blackboard that has some reputable company behind it. If google had a suitable product they would have to work hard and hold hands to get the first couple of major universities to deploy (not even that if the product was deployable rather than google hosted). After that faculty at other universities would begin quietly demanding relief from the bane of their student's and their instructional lives now that there was a justifiable alternative.

Universities are dying for an alternative to Blackboard that has some reputable company behind it.

What exactly do you mean when you say "universities"? There is the IT dept, the students, the staff, the budgeting people--each with their own motivations. My experience has been that Blackboard has the IT depts. and the budgeting people across the schools in their pocket. The only people that hate Blackboard are students and professors. Unfortunately they dont seem to have much pull or motivation to force a change.

There are good and even free alternatives to Blackboard but that's not enough to kill or even injure blackboard.

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