Blackboard Market Power

My main issue with Blackboard is that I fear that how we teach, and our philosophy of pedagogy, is already, and will increasingly be, dictated by the marketing considerations, as played out in software design, of a purely for-profit entity.

This fear is exacerbated when I contemplate what we marketers lovingly refer to as "lock-in". Lock-in occurs when management arranges the product architecture such that the customer just can't afford the cost of switching brands (retraining, recoding, ...). This goes hand in hand with proprietary standards.