> If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpre

> If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpress that didn't have an insane database schema, but web programmers are herd animals. There were many other decent competitors when WordPress was first forked like Movable Type and Textpattern. Many people I know also used LiveJournal and their forks heavily, and of course there was the Blogger crowd. For CMS, there was PHPNuke, PostNuke, Joomla, Mambo, but they were all for "professional" website developers, not for people unfamiliar with web development and just looking to muck around. I think WordPress took off mainly because the web crowd rallied around it for their then-good design and taste. Plugins and "good enough" themes were another moat — I think it helped that plugins let people install just enough rope to hang themselves with (or: they get to decide the level of complexity they're comfortable with), unlike the ready-built CMSes which bundled everything and the kitchen sink. Now, I have no idea why most of the early WordPress community chose to rally around and elevate Matt Mullenweg, but I personally think he wrote well and had good taste back in the days.