Our thoughts on WordPress targeting 50% market share

The growth of WordPress in the last 2 to 3 years has been phenomenal and it seems that every time a new statistic appears regarding market share, WordPress is growing more and more. For an open source project to continue to innovate and improve shows a lot to the legion of contributors who seem to share a common outcome of constantly improving what WordPress can do and how it works behind the scenes.

We welcome the growth and expansion of WordPress although there are some precautionary tales especially when Matt Mullenweg is ambitiously targeting a 50% market share for WordPress sites. I certainly think the interesting thing with this is that you still find a lot of non techy people who have never even heard of WordPress, shame on them!

The items to bear in mind are:

The rise of the theme authors in it for a quick buck – There are a lot of amazing dev’s out there, there are also some people who seem to think that providing sub-standard code that is written purely to make money is acceptable.

Innovation being succeeded by stagnation – Will WordPress continue to innovate or will it get stuck with the dilemma of needing to conform as its usage increases further. Will there be even more resistance to change as more people become accustomed to a way of WordPress working?

Over monetization of services – WordPress being solely a business for people rather than a combination of a passion and a business. The WordPress community is unique and we are thankful for its openness. Will people fall out of love with it if it becomes too business focused and away from its original blogging platform identity?

Devaluing of products – As more products / plugins / themes become available it becomes harder to discern the quality products from the not so quality products and this is something that is certainly true already. Whilst the cream will always rise to the top, will it be less inspiring a project to work on when it becomes more saturated? This is also true for developers and identifying people who produce the goods, time after time.

WordPress growth should always be encouraged as with its growth becomes more opportunities to learn together about the best way to take the entire community forward. We just have to be aware of the potential pitfalls.

This article has probably raised more questions than it has provided answers and we welcome comments about what you think regarding the topics raised