People don't go to wordpress.com because of the name or the content on the site.

People use WP because it's a technology they understand and can put to a particular use. If that changes, said people may not use it anymore.

If the NYT decides to change their content delivery platform to, literally, whatever, people would still go read the NYT. Their audience doesn't care.

If WP becomes a different product (a static site generator for Rust, deployed with Kubernetes?), their customer base will drop to ~0 overnight.

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?