From: wikien-l-bounces(a)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