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How did WordPress win?

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mouser:
Interesting article from Movable Type, a blogging system that was once as popular as WordPress but lost the popularity contest..

Believe it or not, members of the Movable Type community often wonder the same thing. Most recently someone in the ProNet community, frustrated by their experience with WordPress, asked the question: how on Earth did WordPress win the battle over Movable Type?" The question was rhetorical, but sparked a very interesting dialog in our community.

In the past I have refrained from answering such questions, or if I did, I would not respond publicly, for reasons I can only attribute to a mentality that was beaten into me while I worked at Six Apart.. This time however, "to hell with it" I say. Let's talk about this. Let's see what lessons can be learned from WordPress so that others seeking to build a successful product can learn from it.

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http://www.majordojo.com/2011/02/how-did-wordpress-win.php





from http://www.gadgetopia.com/

mouser:
This part really jumped out at me, as relevant for free software developers:

What resonated with customers first and foremost however was not WordPress' license, but the fact that it was unambiguously free. Back then no one knew that much about open source, much less the GPL, but what they did know was all that mattered: open source means free. Period. Forever.

The fact that Movable Type was in all reality free for the vast majority of people using it was irrelevant because it was never clear when Movable Type was free and when it was not. And what users feared most of all, is a repeat of exactly what happened the day Movable Type announced its licensing change: one day waking up to the realization that you owe some company hundreds, if not thousands of dollars1 and not being able to afford or justify the cost monetarily or on principle.
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But then this shocked me:

One thing rarely cited by the outside world, probably because it was not visible or apparent to anyone, was the systematic targeting of high profile brands to switch from using any competing platform to using WordPress.  In fact, in the four years I was at Six Apart, if I had a dollar every time a significant and loyal TypePad and Movable Type customer confided in me that an employee of Automattic cold called them to encourage and entice them to switch to WordPress I would have quit a rich man. Automattic would extend whatever services it could, at no expense to the customer, getting them to switch. They would give away hosting services. They would freely dedicate engineers to the task of migrating customers' data from one system to another. They would do whatever it took to move people to WordPress.

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I continue to feel like a naive idiot whenever I hear about some open source software company being so aggressive about trying to grab marketshare in order to make money in the long run.. My brain just can't quite wrap around open source as a cut throat business model.

Eóin:
My brain just can't quite wrap around open source as a cut throat business model.
-mouser (February 10, 2011, 06:15 PM)
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Me neither, but then maybe it's not opensource which is the business model, it's probably the business men in the background, not the programmers.

wraith808:
My brain just can't quite wrap around open source as a cut throat business model.
-mouser (February 10, 2011, 06:15 PM)
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Me neither, but then maybe it's not opensource which is the business model, it's probably the business men in the background, not the programmers.
-Eóin (February 10, 2011, 06:41 PM)
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When people talk about just wanting to make free software, its inevitably someone that hasn't been faced with the reality of justifying ROI to investors.  When any project that is not absolutely open reaches a certain point, someone is or perceives that they are that investor.  And that's when it gets ugly.  Information may want to be free, but money also wants to be made.

Renegade:
That was an excellent article. Thanks for posting it.

Regarding OSS as cutthroat, sigh... The thing about OSS is that it's only a software licensing model, and not a business model in the exact same way that the way I license my non-OSS software is only a license, and not a business model. There are many successful businesses out there that run off of GPL of otherwise OSS software. DotNetNuke has a BSD-ish license but still runs a very successful business.

People think that you need to sell a product to have a business, but that's just not true, now more than ever. Services and content are the big things now. Products are increasingly becoming commodities while branding becomes increasingly important. Why use X over Y? Because I know X and trust it. I don't know Y from Z or whatever, so it's out of the question.

WordPress won the mindshare battle, as he details in the article.

The part about Perl wasn't a surprise though. "Perl, the only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption." While a joke, it's not far from the truth. PHP is the lowest common denominator language out there. It's relatively easy to learn and use and it's free. The barrier to entry is about as low as you get.

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