Damn, reading all this makes me feel terrible. I wonder what goes on in somebody’s mind to make them self-sabotage their lives like Matt has over the past couple of weeks.
It’s not about success or failure, it’s about investing your ego so deeply into your business that morality and sanity end up seeming like reasonable currencies to spend as a last resort to viewing yourself as a failure. He is the Matt in the company name Auto-Matt-ic, so of course he’s taking it poorly. There are serious downsides to Cult of Personality meets Cult of Infinite Annual Growth.
Honestly, though, the weirdest thing to me about all of this is that corporations already behave like Matt every day, yet when a human starts doing so, we consider involuntarily removing them from society. Perhaps we ought to be less forgiving of his behaviors from the non-humans, too.
I think part of it is that corporations tend to be lawful evil, not chaotic. We shouldn’t forgive that but it’s not as dramatic when Oracle or Broadcom jacks up their prices because they don’t target one company with unhinged rants like they kicked the CEO’s dog, and it follows a legal contract process.
That boring grind just isn’t going to get attention the way an exploding dumpster does even though it’s more extractive.
He's made his millions. He could leave wordpress completely and have a great rest-of-life. In fact, he probably should.
I knew him when he was working out of CNET's basement on 2nd st in SF, doing the initial commercialization of wordpress. I honestly don't see anything inconsistent in his current behavior with who he was back then.
My working theory is that investors are pulling up ladders now that interest rates are VC-unprofitable, and so either he finds a way to increase growth in profit y-o-y or they bail and let him crash like TypePad did years ago. (Except TypePad had paying customers, so their bandwidth bills weren’t anywhere near the looming threat WP is presumably facing.)
Yeah, exactly! No reason for it to collapse into ashes like the Wordpress “I dream of ruling an ecosystem by refusing to charge money” plans will, even if certainly as an old thing it’s old.
You might want to visit https://www.typepad.com/pricing as a logged-out user, and read the entire pop-up (which has been present for 4 years now) before saying that...
I'm aware, but to explain the parent comment for the other readers of the site: Typepad wasn't able to continue operating through one of the dotcom crashes as an independent concern, but their hosting servers and customers were sold intact to another business, which continues to operate the TypePad servers for existing paying customers only.
My point was more re: "refusing to charge money" is an ironic criticism of WP when comparing to Typepad, a service whose owners are outright refusing to accept new paying users... and who have a pop-up directing prospective new users to instead use WordPress hosting on BlueHost (which is owned by the same parent company who bought Typepad).
No new users means Typepad's revenue will only ever shrink, which bodes poorly for the service's future. Having a massive intricate Perl codebase doesn't help either – it was designed to scale relative to aughts-era hardware, for a much larger audience than it currently has. Its future was already bleak in 2010 when Six Apart (its original owner) was acquired by VideoEgg, which came about largely because WordPress/Automattic absolutely won out over Movable Type and Typepad for blogging software market share.
As a former Six Apart employee, I'm glad that Typepad is still around 14 years after all that, but I'd be surprised if it continues to exist for much longer.
