WordPress Founder Has A Dig At Competitors

Blogging, Software

Recently Matt Mullenweg was interviewed by Adriaan Pienaar about all things WordPress. Adriaan asks a good question about Movable Type:

And the second part of the question is, considering Movable Type (probably your main competitor for WordPress.org) has been commercial for so long now, is the fact that WP is Open-Source a competitive advantage?

and Matt responds, whilst slipping in a quick left jab:

Movable Type has been available cheaply or for free for a long time, and they recently announced that they’re going to open source it, but I think people will still continue to choose WordPress because it’s not about price, it’s about quality.

You’ve just got to love it.

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2 thoughts on “WordPress Founder Has A Dig At Competitors”

  1. Well, I think Matt’s statement was a fair one – you can’t be the masterbrain behind a great project, if you don’t believe that your product is actually the best! Plus – there must be a reason for WP’s popularity and the amount of WP fanboys out there…

  2. Adriaan,

    I completely agree, I wasn’t suggesting that Matt’s comment was off base at all; just that I found it quite funny that he is happy to have a dig at a competitor.

    I think there are a few simple things that spring boarded WordPress into the most popular blogging package:

    • It was and has remained free. If what happened to SixApart has taught anyone anything, its that low cost and cheap cannot compete with free.
    • Installation is dead simple. I’m impressed that the early blogging adopters persevered with MovableType for as long as they did, it was such a pain in the arse to get running in my opinion. I expect that people put up with it because there wasn’t a better option, enter WordPress.
    • Enhancements and extension. WordPress is so simple to write plugins for. So simple in fact, that people have patched core functionality which didn’t suite them with a plugin!

    It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the future with MovableType now that it has been open sourced. I think that WordPress has a strange hold at the moment and it was take true innovation from SixApart to start to really claw back market share.

    Time will tell.

    Al.

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