Why are there over 700 LMS vendors?

Why ARE there so many LMS vendors? Why isn’t the market consolidated like, say, the CRM market (Salesforce)? I’m sharing a post by John Leh of Talented Learning that explores the reasons for this market choice/fragmentation (depending on which way you see it).

There’s a link to the full article below, but this extract goes quite a way towards capturing the candy-store nature of the current LMS market:

Cloud technology has lowered the barrier of market entry for LMS vendors.  New LMS vendors with minimal investment can create a SaaS cloud LMS of limited scope to target a specific business problem, industry or region with a low cost solution … with each new customer, the vendor builds an incremental, predictable, profitable and recurring revenue stream.  Revenue is reinvested in expanding functionality to broaden the vendor’s market and price point.  It’s a great business model, and I know over 100 vendors who think so, also!