Peter Mackay wrote:
From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
charles matthews wrote:
(i) If the market is really saying that there is a huge revenue available since people 'in general' don't mind ads (the good French verb is 'mithridatiser', I recall), why is no corporation not sincerely chasing this money with a high-quality WP clone?
Since there are already mirrors with ads, yes, there are people chasing that money now. A high-quality clone that could compete with WP's name recognition would require significant investment up front, and take several years to establish itself in the public's mind;
Your idealism and loyalty is laudable, but remember that in terms of quality, a teenager with a bit of Linux knowledge can download the whole lot for free and get it operational in an afternoon.*
That would be the "low-quality" clone. One Linux box is easily slashdotted; the current WP installation laughs at Slashdot, or so I'm told. Our teenager would have to buy 100+ machines and get them all working in concert before going live.
And I rather suspect that our "name recognition" is due more to being up near the top of Google search results than any other single factor. If Google developed their own product, I can confidently predict that it would be way cooler than WP, and that they would bump their own results above WP's in Google searches.
Well, their motto is supposedly "don't be evil", but of course if they *were* truly evil, they would lie about their motto. :-)
Stan