Comment by tptacek
20 days ago
I don't think WordPress is a good example at all. All sorts of weird stuff gets shoehorned into Excel (see the horrors of any prop trading firm). The point is: Excel is wildly successful, because before it was a platform, it was a solution to an important specific problem. Same with WordPress.
You're falling into the Zombocom trap when your initial value proposition is the same as Zombocom's.
Good point. WordPress is the wildly successful one of the five I mentioned.
It also did this to a certain extent, from the post:
> This customer acts as the edge-of-the-wedge for expanding into adjacent use cases (next best customer is music)
These include various types of content (VideoPress, portfolio plugins, podcasts, custom post types), shopping (WooCommerce), and forums (BuddyPress, bbPress)
However, it isn't quite a general purpose self-hosted app platform. Something limited it from continuing it going into adjacent use cases, and I think part of it is that its plugins still tie into a system that's still oriented towards blog/CMS use cases.