The article is about Wordpress.com selling 100-year registrations.
Their platform is whatever they call “Wordpress”. In the same way, NYT on a phone app is conceptually the same NYT as the one printed in 1923, even if almost nothing in the production pipeline is the same.
Wordpress.com can change their technology without becoming something else.
They own the Wordpress trademark just like NYT owns theirs. Somebody who buys a 100-year registration from Wordpress will have the service delivered on whatever Wordpress has become by 2123.
Well, duh. If a company suddenly stopped selling the product that their users rely on, they would lose sales. This is hardly a revelation.
There are lots of examples of software platforms transitioning to a new foundation while retaining a compatibility shim for those bits of the old applications that customers still need. Text-mode COBOL applications are deployed on Windows 11, which itself has almost nothing in common with Windows 1.0.
Wordpress.com would need to maintain compatibility with some PHP+MySQL plugins. This doesn’t seem insurmountable, especially as AI code translation is now a thing.
> If WP becomes a different product (a static site generator for Rust, deployed with Kubernetes?), their customer base will drop to ~0 overnight.
You're imagining this change happening in a world where people still care about Wordpress.
Try imagining instead, a world where Wordpress is already a dead technology that nobody would use for a greenfield project, and it's only "legacy" sites that haven't been modified in 10 years (but which are owned by brick-and-mortar companies that continue faithfully paying the hosting bills every month) that are still hosted on Wordpress.com.
Can you not then see the value in some company buying up Wordpress.com, and migrating its customers over to a Wordpress-compatibility-shim over their own service that's based on a not-dead technology?
I'm not sure if you're being intentionally dense but predicting the future is hard and wordpress could be a package of gummy bears in 100 years. Nintendo used to sell cards or something. Yeah, wordpress is a technology but it also is a name and that name has value regardless if they technology stops working.
Windows 98 is a technology. Windows XP is a technology. Both share very little in common under the hood, one being descended from DOS and one from Windows NT. The customer doesn't care, to them it's still Windows as long as it looks and feels the same, and most of your old stuff still works.
Just because Wordpress 6.3 is a php monstrosity with a security-disaster-riddled ecosystem doesn't mean Wordpress 12 has to use php and can't have sandboxed extensions. For all we know, Wordpress 12 could be a fancy frontend for a static site generator (marketed as "ultra-caching" or whatever)
Wordpress-the-company owns the name "Wordpress." They can sell that trademark, and then whoever they sell it to can call something else "Wordpress", and the current technology would have to get a different name.
Their platform is whatever they call “Wordpress”. In the same way, NYT on a phone app is conceptually the same NYT as the one printed in 1923, even if almost nothing in the production pipeline is the same.