3 ms·
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 a
by 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.