I am worried about those developers at WordPress. They have to eat food, drink coffee and wear clothes but how are they ever going to make any money ? There isn’t even a ‘Donate’ button anywhere on the site.
WordPress.com provide me with a hosted blogging platform which I think it is very good; better than Blogger, better than Bloglines, better than Yahoo 360’, better than most of the competition.
The service provided by WordPress costs me absolutely nothing so represents excellent value for money and I would recommend the service to any of my blogging friends (if I had any).
WordPress have to provide servers, manage those machines, implement resilience, scalability and high availability, develop code, do boring things like backups, testing, fix bugs, worry about the business plan, buy laptops, S & M (sales & marketing, not the other one) and what do I give them in return ? A load of feedback (mainly negative) about minor, trivial things that don’t work and waste their time whenever I have made an idiotic mistake (quite frequently).
Now, WordPress are planning to add extra features and functionality (customised CSS and templates, more themes and plug-ins, hosting on your server, statistics) which will cost money but they have also pledged that the current functionality will remain free. The sad fact is I am very unlikely to pay them anything for additional add-on features, ever.
This main reason is because I am quite happy with the existing product. Secondly, any additional contribution would have to be minimal as I could pay my ISP an extra 4 GBP per month to add PHP and then would be able to run WordPress.org with total control over everything. This would be more work for me but would probably be fun and an interesting experiment anyway.
Maybe I am not typical, maybe there are hundreds of frustrated WordPress bloggers out there with cheque books poised waiting for the two tier service to be announced. For the sake of the freeloaders like me, let’s jolly well hope so.