I am surprised that they went with the old Citroen logo for this locked down version of OB, but nothing surprises me from Pearson.

A few years back I did some work for a fantastic startup ‘incubated’ at Pearson, to create an iTunes for education. The ODE team were awesome, and worked in almost complete isolation from the rest of the corporate monster. We got to heads of agreement with several other big publishers and lots of smaller ones on the basis that Pearson promised to make this an open platform — with no weighting towards their own content.

Once we worked out the details and were ready to ramp up, an order came down to lock the whole thing in a box. They stopped us from apologising to all the companies whose time we wasted, and went on to use the tech that had been developed to serve internal clients content for repackaging old content into ‘new’ products.

In other words, Pearson had a working model of the open virus that might have challenged the textbook sales business. Once they had learned what they wanted from it — they killed it-immunising themselves from it.

So sad for the brilliant team — and the last post on their blog is full of the disappointment and resentment that Pearson generates from those who care about education.