LORE
http://lore.com/
During the fall of 2011 a webpage called Coursekit was released to the public. This website, later to be known as LORE, is a website where a professor can manage his courses (direct competition of BlackBoard). I happened to learn about the existence of this website around October 2011, when a friend mentioned its existence. When I checked the website out I realized of the high quality of the product offered. It was clear that this product was so much better than anything currently available, specially a lot better than the absolutely updated BlackBoard. It has an intuitive, well designed, interface and allows for easy student-to-professor interaction as well as multiple tools for professors to keep the class well organized. I got excited and looked around to figure out how the founders (Penn University drop outs) were planning to tackle the problem that they were facing: stealing a good piece of market share held by the current monopoly, BlackBoard. To tackle this the founders decided to do to things: first, make the service free (BlackBoard charges the universities). Second, instead of trying to try to negotiate with each University (BlackBoard’s strategy), they decided to convince professor by professor. This would allow them to deal directly with the people who benefit from the service and not to university administrators whose priorities are to keep things functioning without any drastic changes. I thought that although it might take a while to convince all professors, this was a smart move since it would be much more difficult to convince University administrators, because they would not understand the benefits of the product, while professors and students would. So I made a prediction back then: even though LORE will have to go through the difficulty in convincing professor one by one, it will take over half of BlackBoard’s business in the next year. To me the difference between LORE’s and BlackBoard’s quality was so evident that I was sure that after LORE was able to convince some professors it would sky rocket to have millions of professors using it; I thought it would sky rocket in the industry of courses just like Facebook sky rocketed in the industry of social interactions, or like Hotmail sky rocketed in the emailing industry. I was wrong however.
It is a year after, and according to the media and LORE’s claims the platform is highly successful with thousands of professors managing their classes using it. Regardless of what these claims might say, I am frankly disappointed; although, my personal wish to finally get to use the platform that I have followed for over a year, none of the classes I am in are using the platform. In fact, I have not heard of any class in Cornell that uses LORE as its managing platform. Maybe LORE is not really interested in Cornell as a market (which I highly doubt), nevertheless I am astonished of the lack of market share they have yet to acquire.
How is this relevant to the class Networks you might ask? Well, now, after all this time following the timeline of LORE, I finally understand why LORE is yet to take over the world of courses. See, the problem of LORE, unlike Facebook or Hotmail, is the nature of its product. Since LORE is based on a class, a user, only interact with other people in the same class; in other words, if LORE is used in a class it forms a cluster of nodes that does not interact with nodes outside the cluster, and thus LORE does not produce direct benefit Cascades. In direct benefit cascades, the “nodes” are active in trying to convert other “nodes” to use the new technology, since having more nodes increases the benefits this technology brings to them. For example, if person A joins Facebook he is likely to tell his friends to join Facebook as well, that way he can benefit more from the product. Nevertheless, if we look at the nature of LORE’s product, when a professor starts using LORE for his classes, he is not likely to want to convert other professors into joining LORE, because his experience is not going to be increased if his peers start using LORE. Thus LORE is incapable of forming a direct benefit cascade and it has to rely simply on a weak information cascade that might form when professors randomly tell each other. Although I still believe that LORE will one day rule over BlackBoard, this day might come slower than expected because LORE does not have the luck to have a product that forms a powerful direct benefit cascade.
Mateo Acebedo