…are condemned to repeat them, said philosopher George Santyana.
Steve Wheeler’s excellent post on Learning Technologies in London described the vendors at the show as stuck in a time warp, maybe on another planet. What does the future hold for these guys? Let’s look back to 1999.
For those of you too young to remember, a dozen years ago venture capitalists, mainly in Silicon Valley, fell in love with the concept of eLearning. Money gushed into learning start-ups.
Merrill Lynch Capital, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities, Hambrecht & Co., SunTrust, Morgan Keegan, Piper Jaffray, Wit Capital, Thomas Weisel Partners, and others wrote hundred-plus page analyses of why eLearning was the hottest investment opportunity out there.
Fueled by the dot.com boom, absurd projections from Gartner, and John Chambers’ observation at Comdex that eLearning would be so huge as to make email look like a rounding error, investors lined up to put money into companies promising to automate learning.
Here’s the universe of companies and their area of specialty by Hambrecht’s Trace Urdan and Connie Weggen in one of the most reasonable reports out there:
The reports usually explained that eLearning scaled without increasing cost. Most of them touted the savings from forcing people to learn on their own time. Everyone extolled the value of slashing travel and classroom real estate cost. Many eyed big savings from eliminating instructors entirely. (“Blended learning” was the rationalization used by companies that found out that people-less training does not work.) Often, vendors were happy to play these economic “benefits” to make a sale whether or not they could be realized.
Here’s who is still around as an independent company ten years later:
Some outfits were swallowed up in mergers but many simply vanished.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but eventually time runs out for stuff that doesn’t work.
Most of the vendors I’m betting on today don’t think of themselves as learning technology companies at all. They are social network companies like Socialcast and Jive, content management firms like Xyleme, communications platforms like Citrix and Skype, social business advisors like Dachis and Altimeter, web 2.0 companies like Twitter and Diigo, do-it-yourself enablers like Jambok or SpacedEd, providers of lightweight web tools like Rypple, performance consultancies like TULSER, and so forth.
I find it telling that when David Mallon of Bersin Associates interviewed dozens of LMS vendors toward the end of last year, he found one common thread: none of them wanted to be known as an LMS vendor. If you are not comfortable in your own skin, maybe it’s time to change what you’re doing.
Related posts:
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
nice research dear
Wow Jay, you really know how to hammer the coffin nails in
This is actually a venn diagram that should be seen by all those in the business of ‘e-learning’ – it speaks volumes, and should be a strack warning to anyone else who wishes to jump onto the bandwagon to try to cash in. Thank you for posting it.
Hi Jay. Great post. You are probably true and your experience is valuable for young consultants like me
I interviewed 23 LMS vendors last year (available on my blog: http://www.lms-selection.com/en2/). It is true that a lot of LMS vendors have moved and are still moving from Learning Management to Talent Management. Others have been acquired by companies who provide training services or HR services. So I agree on the fact that less LMS vendors are pure LMS vendors. Even if I didn’t feel that “none of them wanted to be known as an LMS vendor”…
Why is SkillSoft crossed out? They would probably take issue with that!
Interesting research Jay, certainly eye opening. I’ve got to say though that although many vendors have gone, many more have jumped up in their place. In the UK, there are a number of big vendors that have been around for years and are making very good money from not necessarily great practice. The fact remains that their customers don’t seem to know good learning, or don’t want “new” learning practices so they’re happy to tick the box with okay-ish solutions that seem to meet their needs. eLearning for a lot of companies is a very sticky concept and one that isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
I’ll also say that some eLearning vendors do a very good job in the constraints that are placed on them by their customers and stakeholders, which is the commercial reality they operate in.
Jay, a great post and thanks for the Xyleme mention. I think you really nail it with the comment about being comfortable in your own skin instead of consistently trying to reposition to the latest trend in an attempt to follow the money. As you know, it’s always perplexed me why L&D vendors consistently try to recreate the wheel instead of adapting these new best-of-breed technologies into their own products. The former makes L&D a silo within the organization. The latter not only brings greater value to a vendor’s existing customer base, it expands a vendor’s reach outside the training department. However, I guess it’s simply easier to be short-sighted.
Adam, that’s probably a mistake on my part. When SkillSoft announced they were being acquired/going private, I thought they were going to pop back up with a new identity. Next time around I’ll remove the red line.
The problem came in when those companies used all that money to build CBT online, and lets face it CBT had had limited success even before the web came along. So the wrong companies hijacked online learning to promote their relatively unsuccessful brand of learning. This whole Scorm standard is really about promoting the inter platform operability of powerpoint presentations on steriods, and these companies make most their money from building these overly elaborate courses.
But the idea that you can put skills development on automatic is a huge mistake, and they missed the whole value of what the Internet can offer in terms of providing linkages between people. People must teach people, but use the web and all its wonders. People dont learn by viewing these “entertaining” click through products except for very specific skills sets such as systems training or touch typing. People learn by engaging with substantive information, and throught interactions with coaches or facilitators. The good news is that this can be done very effectively in the online environment. New solutions are begining to do this better, and online learning is taking off in a big way, but quite differently to what was envisaged back then. But who would have predicted social networking to be what it is today!?
{ 2 trackbacks }