On Bluesky: “I’m learning from all the faces of WordPress.” #

The product described on wordpress.com/social is not a real product, I am told by someone inside who I have worked with and trust. They say there will be a lot of these trial products coming out in the coming weeks because this is a project that Matt has given to all developers in the company? Not sure the shape of it, I had heard about this project third-hand but not seen any specifics. I sent my friend an email, which I am not editing, this is exactly as it read, the only change is that I redacted their name. Don’t want to get anyone in trouble. 😉

• okay i understand it wasn’t a real announcement or product, i couldn’t tell — it looked like one.
• suggest you make a bit less of a big deal about the others that are coming out. or put a disclaimer on it.
• the marketing was first class, and most of the things it advertised for were very much part of the pitch for wordland.
• my goal isn’t to sell wordland it’s to take advantage of a window of opportunity for the web to replace the silos that that have taken over web writing.
• i also want to make it possible for developers to make great products and not have to do a full startup to market them.
• as an aside we will open up big new revenue opportunities for wordpress.
• i’ve been hoping to work with you guys, so we could show people what that looks like. to see all my ideas presented so nicely on a one month project makes me want to get out of here. i have no chance in a system like that.
• work with me, you’re working on rss stuff now. we can make some new things happen with not much effort and they won’t be insignificant little projects. if i could show a tiny little bit if success here i think people would respond, but you all don’t want to work with me. at some point i have to give up. i don’t want to, but i’ve rarely managed to get companies to work on projects with me as an independent. i thought this maybe could be the exception, it was worth a try.

I’ve been in the situation I describe many many times. Apple never would have done AppleScript if I hadn’t done Frontier. I gave Microsoft several ideas in the early days of the web, a blogger-based news network, using the incredible flow they had from MSN, and then we had a mission for Zune in 2004, the year that podcasting took off. I was living in Seattle at the time so it would have been convenient and give me an excuse to stay there. They did both products, in the corporate way, thus removing all that was interesting about the ideas. When RSS was the darling of the VC world, many of the VCs talked with me, got my ideas for free, and then invested in people who were more corporate and easier to manage, they also had no idea what they were doing and they all failed. Some things are best left to the entrepreneurs. And you won’t find many of them inside a big corporation, they’re out in the wild, trying out new ideas and seeing what the world thinks.

But I am impressed with the UI design and esp the marketing materials for this product. Imagine what would happen if we were to work together on this project, with full license from the company to go where ever the product took us. I have a ton of working software for just this problem! I didn’t do it in a couple of weeks, I did it in a few years. That’s how long it takes to do a real product. I almost wrote an email to Matt. Maybe he’ll read this post, if so, maybe in the next challenge you should give people a month to do a project with someone who works outside your company, or even better, one of Automattic’s competitors. Work on interop. Make the web stronger. If you do that it can’t help but strenghten WordPress because it’s such a big part of the web. And provide recurring revenue opportunities. (I’ve had similar advice for Mozilla btw.)

BTW, I’m too old to start a company around any of my products, and truthfully it was never anything I wanted to do. When I wake up in the morning I want to write a blog post to warm up my brain and then spend a few hours working with my programming partner Claude, to make a new piece of software that will blow your socks off. I like to speak at conferences too, also have organized a few of them. That’s me. Not a big fan of running companies, any more than an academic, musician or writer would be. I like connecting with other people via our minds.

Also just saw this piece, dated April 15, that describes the impasse in the WordPress open source developer community. To expect an open process to yield user-level features is imho never going to work. If I were in Matt’s shoes, I would ask them to make improvements to the platform, esp the API, and let independent developers work out various different UIs on top of the WordPress OS. It’s much more likely to quickly generate new exciting features for specific kinds of users, and recurring revenue, and make WordPress a harder target for your competitors to hit. And more satisfied users that the picked the right platform. Most of the PR coming out of Automattic in the last couple of years, being brutally honest, has the opposite effect.

I wrote extensively about Microsoft in the early days of the web, most of it critical, but even so I had many friends up there. My conclusion, when a tech company becomes as dominant as Microsoft was then, or Automattic is today, that innovation at a user level is virtually impossible, and not advised, because then you only get one version of each thing, when you need a competitive market in a technology as new as the web was in 1994 and AI is in 2026.

I said to my friends at Microsoft that it’s not bad news. At my age, I can’t do what I did 20 years ago. Fact. I don’t argue with it. For a tech company of A8C’s stature, you can be a banker and distributor. All the corporate functions of tech, but not the creative functions. And I would offer your best most creative. most challenge-seeking developers independence and some seed capital, and always stay in touch with the best, and when they ship an excellent product, write a blog post about what they’ve done, and make sure the users know that these people are exceptional. Add features to your OS to support what they want to do. And deposit the profits in your bank account. And maybe take a leave of absence yourself and work on one of these startups yourself. I said as much to Bill Gates, and i know he heard it, but he didn’t do it. 😉

PS: Finally Microsoft wasn’t humbled by the web, it was the Y2K version of Ram Cram that did them in.