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.*
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.
Peter (Skyring)
*dealing with success and bandwidth might be a problem, however