e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Matt Small

  • The Cost of the Blackboard Patent Suit (and Who Pays It)

    An e-Literate reader comments on my post about Blackboard owing Desire2Learn money:

    The amount [that Blackboard will have to pay Desire2Learn, including the original award plus interest] will probably be over $3.8M USD from my rough estimates which is higher than the expected writedown Blackboard took. This should result in additional expenses that will have to be recorded by BBBB.

    What’s also interesting is that Blackboard’s top execs made record bonuses before this writedown, at the same time they took away any salary increases and the 401K plans for the regular staff. I think that is the bigger story.

    Blackboard reported a $2.8 million net profit in 2008. The $3.3 million write down brings them to a $500,000 loss. An additional estimated write-down of another half a million would bring them to a $1 million loss for 2008. In the same year, Michael Chasen received $545,833 in salary, $663,039 in bonus, $1,833,560 in stock options, $80,466 in shares of restricted stock, and $14,911 in “other compensation”, for total compensation that was valued at $3,137,809. Matt Small received $370,833 in salary, $166,544 in bonus, $722,966 in stock options, $40,233 in shares of restricted stock, and $17,372 in “other compensation”, for a total compensation of $1,317,958. Coincidentally, if you add up the 2008 bonuses for the five Blackboard executives listed in the company’s proxy statement, the total is $1,074,127—almost exactly what the company’s final adjusted net loss for 2008 may turn out to be.

    Moving forward, Blackboard is apparently going to incur the additional expense of an attempt to appeal their failed patent suit to the Supreme Court, even though Matt Small is on record saying that it is highly unlikely they will succeed.

  • Three Tests for the 'New' Blackboard

    Today Blackboard announced that ANGEL’s Ray Henderson will be the new President of the Blackboard Learn division. This is great news. Ray is one of the best executives in educational technology today, known for his competence, his integrity, and his leadership in supporting open standards and openness in general. Does this mean a new beginning for Blackboard?

    Many of us remember when WebCT’s Chris Vento was made Blackboard’s Senior Vice President of Technology and Product Development after that merger. Like Ray, Chris was regarded as a leader in the field. And like Ray, he was a champion of open standards. I remember listening to Chris, soon after the merger, speaking with great confidence about how Blackboard was committed to standards like Tool Interoperability, how openness was good for Blackboard’s business, and how it was a new day. A year later, he was gone. Blackboard is not known today for its leadership in open standards. Nor is it known for its leadership in customer service—something that the company claimed it was going to learn from WebCT and claims again that it will learn from ANGEL. Going by the tweets from the ANGEL user conference, Blackboard’s leadership wasn’t talking a whole lot this week about how Chris and the WebCT leadership helped to change Blackboard’s culture for the better. When the speakers mentioned WebCT at all, it seemed to be mostly to say that they underestimated how buggy the software was. That’s not change we can believe in.

    So the question is whether Blackboard will prove more willing to be changed by Ray and ANGEL than they were by Chris and WebCT. Are they ready to learn? Time will tell. But there are three specific actions I will be watching for as early tests of just how serious Blackboard is about learning from ANGEL, particularly with regard to openness.

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