It's hard to even imagine what a best-case scenario looks like for Matt at this point. Putting aside the matter of righteousness, his business is pretty much chalked for professional applications at this point. B2B partnerships are done - anyone with lawyers on-staff are going to get shoulder-tapped and asked to find another hosting solution. Smaller customers have all the more reason to bleed out to competitors, and the plugin/theme ecosystem is going to see the writing on the wall better than anyone else. Qui bono? Who is Matt "protecting" from harm, really?
I just don't understand in any sense what the end goal was here. On the one hand, I feel like I must not understand because I lack an emotional connection to the project. In the other hand, I feel like a stoic approach is the only one that makes sense. It's a baffling tempest-in-a-teapot that must have extra details I don't understand. If all this occurred with no hidden motives, it would be a shockingly wasteful decision.
If it's any three things, it's about money, money, and money.
Zooming out a bit, Automattic acquired Tumblr and like all those before it seems to be choking on it.
Competitors like Wix, Squarespace, WebFlow and Shopify are all nipping at WordPress' marketshare.
I don't know what WordPress.com's stats look like, but blogging is out of sytle. New cool kids want the new black. That is to be social media influencers. Along the same lines, the WordPress Community is "aging out". Events online or off there's too little "youth" engaged and excited about the product.
In shoet, the pie isn't what it once was. Matt looked around the room, saw deep pockets (i.e., WP Engine) and made a go for it. That was a poor decision. Seeing himself as a cult leader who would get unwavering support from his cult (aka The WordPress Community) was another mistake. People are fatigued and enough them have stopped drinking his Kool Aid. There are pockets of support but certainly not what it used to be. Many WP people are anxious to move on from the Mattopoly.
OTOH maybe the majority of WP users are not blogging.
It's anecdotal but I know about a dozen WP users first-hand (and maintain a couple of those installations) and none of them use it for blogging. It's mostly for marketing websites and shops with WooCommerce.
Work has about 25 clients who use WordPress. Not a single one of them "blogs". WordPress is a decent-enough CMS, all those clients are just running websites they can edit themselves. The big advantage of offering them WordPress if having a huge talent pool of people they can contract or employ who know how to publish using it, and a huge wealth of readily available tutorials and training material for them too learn how to do that themselves.
Do they have News that gets updated as the voice of the brand? That's a blog.
Do they have a portfolio of work that gets updated as the work of the brand? That's a blog.
What about case studies?
Any ongoing activity that's add to the site in a "social update" sort of way is effectively the blog.
That's been WP original idenity. As you noted, that's not a priority any more. Now tools like Shopify, WebFlow, etc *in the eyes of the market* have parity. And while Matt went all in on Gutenberg / Blocks there were already a number of page builders. Blocks is not gaining traction. It was a *horrible* product rollout.
So what's WP's and Automattic's identity now? Extortionist?? Certainly looks that way. Ugly but true.
Whatever else may be going on, your observations contain errors. Automattic has been on an insane revenue growth tear for years. WordPress install growth out in the wild has been flat for two years but not ticked down, when 43% of the Internet runs your software there are probably a lot of reasons it's hard to grow that number.
In general, companies in this vertical are not really hurting.
I'm pretty sure CNN and Reuters are actually on WPVIP, which is basically the enterprise version of .com and belongs to the same parent company as .com.
I think this is significant. As I caught up on this conversation I've seen it interwoven with saltiness about "The Block Editor", which I understand is a new WYSIWYG editor replacing the classic editor under deprecation and which an increasing part of the community have been feeling alienated and forced by. It's been Matt's baby and WP hasn't been taking the community feedback to heart.
Yup. There is a lack of faith in the leadership, and it's spreading. Still plenty of Kool Aid drinking, but far less fear about speaking out
People took time off and spent money to go to WordCamp US. MM used his keynote to shit on a prominent entity in the ecosystem. And entity many people know, use and love. There was no need to go nuclear at that event, using that keynote.
Either someone said "No Matt, this isn't a good time" and he ignored them. Or no one close to him stood up to say anything. Both of these scenarios are ugly.
I can hardly imagine anyone being in cult with WP. People use it because of the huge ecosystem around it and the accessible talent pool. One can hardly be impressed by the tech itself - in fact almost everyone thinks it sucks.
I just don't understand in any sense what the end goal was here. On the one hand, I feel like I must not understand because I lack an emotional connection to the project. In the other hand, I feel like a stoic approach is the only one that makes sense. It's a baffling tempest-in-a-teapot that must have extra details I don't understand. If all this occurred with no hidden motives, it would be a shockingly wasteful decision.