Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable
The key here is “given time.” Much of the work that we do is hard. It’s easier to put everyone in the same database. It’s easier to put everyone on the same domain, and you look much better on comScore rather than being dark matter. Open source eventually dominates every market it enters, but sometimes “eventually” can take a while. For online publishing and content management systems, WordPress helped it happen quickly. “Linux on the desktop” is perpetually a few years away.
We have to be comfortable swimming upstream, with most of the world considering us wrong for long periods of time. This is uncomfortable. Sometimes it means we’ll be ostracized. More often people, “Silicon Valley,” or the market will consider us parochial, unambitious, or just plain stupid. They’ll be right unless our success proves differently.
Automattic