14 ms·

I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and immediately a

by seldo 16y ago

I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and immediately assume "and therefore we should". Microsoft sees Google being a search engine and sinks billions upon billions into failing to be one. Google sees Facebook being social and decides it needs to be social (an upcoming disaster). Facebook sees Twitter being real-time and decides it needs a real-time stream too (a bad idea they have since buried under the "most recent" link). In the CMS world, we have Drupal for complicated content-management, Wordpress for full-featured blogs, and Tumblr for drop-dead-simple blogs. There is no reason one of these products should try to fill all three roles, and no practical way to do so (because it is, I posit, impossible to be both as simple as Tumblr and as configurable as Drupal). Wordpress is great. It is the leader in its category. There's no need for it to try jumping into another category that would distract from its core competency.

bergie 16y ago
...which is why I've found it weird that people try to shoehorn WordPress to become a full-blown CMS platform. There are better tools for that, and the effort detracts from the strong points of WordPress in blogging
- ams6110 16y ago
  People tend to reach for familiar tools first, even if they're not really the right ones. They go with what they know.
- chc 16y ago
  Having looked at the field numerous times when building and advising on websites for smallish newspapers and magazines, I have yet to actually find a better CMS platform for the common use case of "I want to publish articles, plus some other additional stuff on the side," since that matches the actual structure of a WordPress-based CMS.
rhizome 16y ago
It is an article of faith in contemporary business that a company not integrating vertically or horizontally is doomed. The Peter Principle, the tail wagging the dog, take your pick: the lesson has been learned everywhere but the board room.
cantbecool 16y ago
Even though Microsoft made its mistakes in search, I do not think Bing is anywhere near a failure of search engine. Look at Cuil for a true example of a failure.
zaidf 16y ago
I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and immediately assume "and therefore we should". Is it really that hard to understand? Most corporations, almost by definition, must grow...often in multiple directions. They must expand market share in markets they already exist in and enter new markets they previously shrugged off. I wouldn't say companies do this "immediately." In fact, quite the opposite. Microsoft joked about the search market for years before realizing its more than a joke. Ditto for google and social networking...social was seen as a joke at google circa 2006 as facebook was on the verge of exploding.
- cma 16y ago
  >social was seen as a joke at google circa 2006 as facebook was on the verge of exploding "In 2003, Google offered to purchase the social network Friendster, but the offer was declined by that company. Google then internally commissioned Orkut Büyükkökten to work on a competing independent project. The result was Orkut. The product launched on January 24, 2004."
  - zaidf 16y ago
    A failed purchase of a social network only proves my point, if anything. When google really believes in a company, they go to great extremes to grab it. See YouTube.
    - cma 16y ago
      This was 2003. Facebook didn't even exist then. Are you just trolling? Would a big YouTube-style purchase of Friendster have even worked out well for Google?
- seldo 16y ago
  I understand expanding into adjacencies as a sensible mode of growth for a company with mature products -- so Google obviously expands into different types of advertising, and AOL into different types of content, and Apple into new form factors of portable electronic devices. But I think the critical difference is that those are new products by old companies, and specifically products where they can use existing expertise or technology and apply it successfully. So Microsoft's expansion into search makes no sense because they hate the web and have always sucked at it. Facebook's expansion into real-time made no sense because the whole value of their stream was its curated nature. Of all of the examples of bad expansions I mentioned, the suggestion that the contributors of WordPress create a "WordPress lite" that is simple and Tumblr-like actually sounds on the face of it like the best of the bunch. But in my opinion, Tumblr's primary advantage is not its interface (though that's a big secondary feature) but its community. Tumblr provides a built-in mechanism for content discovery and distribution, and is insanely viral -- the only way to comment on a post most of the time is to reblog it to your own tumblr. For WordPress to create a Tumblr-like "WordPress Lite" would involve far more than merely stripping down the interface. They would have to completely rework WordPress.com to provide a centralized identity and content-distribution mechanism. Not only would that take them far away from their core competency of building single-instance software, but as Tumblr is demonstrating, building such a platform is technically very challenging. My point is not so much that WordPress should not attempt such a project. They're smart -- maybe they could pull it off. But such an expansion is by no means a simplification of their current software; it is in fact a significantly harder problem.

by seldo 16y ago

bergie 16y ago

...which is why I've found it weird that people try to shoehorn WordPress to become a full-blown CMS platform. There are better tools for that, and the effort detracts from the strong points of WordPress in blogging

ams6110 16y ago
People tend to reach for familiar tools first, even if they're not really the right ones. They go with what they know.
chc 16y ago
Having looked at the field numerous times when building and advising on websites for smallish newspapers and magazines, I have yet to actually find a better CMS platform for the common use case of "I want to publish articles, plus some other additional stuff on the side," since that matches the actual structure of a WordPress-based CMS.

rhizome 16y ago

It is an article of faith in contemporary business that a company not integrating vertically or horizontally is doomed. The Peter Principle, the tail wagging the dog, take your pick: the lesson has been learned everywhere but the board room.

cantbecool 16y ago

Even though Microsoft made its mistakes in search, I do not think Bing is anywhere near a failure of search engine. Look at Cuil for a true example of a failure.

zaidf 16y ago

I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and immediately assume "and therefore we should". Is it really that hard to understand? Most corporations, almost by definition, must grow...often in multiple directions. They must expand market share in markets they already exist in and enter new markets they previously shrugged off. I wouldn't say companies do this "immediately." In fact, quite the opposite. Microsoft joked about the search market for years before realizing its more than a joke. Ditto for google and social networking...social was seen as a joke at google circa 2006 as facebook was on the verge of exploding.

cma 16y ago
>social was seen as a joke at google circa 2006 as facebook was on the verge of exploding "In 2003, Google offered to purchase the social network Friendster, but the offer was declined by that company. Google then internally commissioned Orkut Büyükkökten to work on a competing independent project. The result was Orkut. The product launched on January 24, 2004."
- zaidf 16y ago
  A failed purchase of a social network only proves my point, if anything. When google really believes in a company, they go to great extremes to grab it. See YouTube.
  - cma 16y ago
    This was 2003. Facebook didn't even exist then. Are you just trolling? Would a big YouTube-style purchase of Friendster have even worked out well for Google?
seldo 16y ago
I understand expanding into adjacencies as a sensible mode of growth for a company with mature products -- so Google obviously expands into different types of advertising, and AOL into different types of content, and Apple into new form factors of portable electronic devices. But I think the critical difference is that those are new products by old companies, and specifically products where they can use existing expertise or technology and apply it successfully. So Microsoft's expansion into search makes no sense because they hate the web and have always sucked at it. Facebook's expansion into real-time made no sense because the whole value of their stream was its curated nature. Of all of the examples of bad expansions I mentioned, the suggestion that the contributors of WordPress create a "WordPress lite" that is simple and Tumblr-like actually sounds on the face of it like the best of the bunch. But in my opinion, Tumblr's primary advantage is not its interface (though that's a big secondary feature) but its community. Tumblr provides a built-in mechanism for content discovery and distribution, and is insanely viral -- the only way to comment on a post most of the time is to reblog it to your own tumblr. For WordPress to create a Tumblr-like "WordPress Lite" would involve far more than merely stripping down the interface. They would have to completely rework WordPress.com to provide a centralized identity and content-distribution mechanism. Not only would that take them far away from their core competency of building single-instance software, but as Tumblr is demonstrating, building such a platform is technically very challenging. My point is not so much that WordPress should not attempt such a project. They're smart -- maybe they could pull it off. But such an expansion is by no means a simplification of their current software; it is in fact a significantly harder problem.