Competing/Coopting with Wordpress.org/com etc

im here
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

There is no doubt that Wordpress is the most important, used, developed on and leading blog platform out there. It is impossible for the costly Six Apart to compete in a apples to apples way. But : the biggest competition to Wordpress is Wordpress - whether it be .com, .org, Automattic, or many of the others developing on it, such as what we're doing at a local Australian level to build the gnoos index or what the Aussie World Guru Mr James Farmer is doing on edublogs and uniblogs - whose vertical focus is Education. There will be alot to go around (so competition isnt really the issue), so it will be interesting to see how the fledgling commercial Wordpress blog market defines itself now the VC bets are coming in. Great post from Mike@Polaris, one of the new investors : "At the same time, an impressive list of people whose jobs and careers require the best love Wordpress, so much so that they have switched from other popular blog platforms. Just to name a few, the list includes the likes of Robert Scoble, Rafat Ali (PaidContent.org), Om Malik (GigaOm), About.com, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and, of course, CNET, who is also investing in Automattic."

As Tony Schneider, their waaay experienced/smart CEO (sold Oddpost to Yahoo then managed their developer network) says on the grey line between the bottom line in the black focused Automattic with the white and blue of Wordpress.org : "Automattic does not own wordpress.org (it's owned by Matt who is creating a non-profit WordPress Foundation to ensure that WordPress will always remain open source). However, Automattic is a major contributor to WordPress with all of our developers working to constantly improve and support the software. Because this financing gives Automattic the financial stability to be around for a long time, we will be able to continue to contribute to the WordPress community for a long time."