I agree with the message of original article. Like every company that becomes big, WordPress does risk getting stuck in the rut that brought it success.

WP does appear afraid of change. As the author here validates for them, "it doesn’t make sense to push out major changes that could stop the growth of WordPress or worse, decrease market share due to so many disgruntled users."

That is rut thinking. That's the sort of thing you'd expect to hear at a Microsoft planning meeting. The goal shouldn't be maintaining a user head count. That's the way Microsoft thinks. The goal is to stay relevant.

WP4 does need to be a major overhaul. It will have to rock the boat - but not sink it. That takes guts and talent. Does Automattic have the wherewithal to pull it off? I think they do.

WordPress though does need to avoid that fear of overhaul rut. The backend (essentially the same for 10 years) is not user friendly. Things like shortcodes, custom fields, metaboxes, media management. My biggest dread is having to teach newbies WP. Teaching them the difference between posts and pages, categories and tags, visual and text editing and so on.

Thank god for WP101!!!

The backend does need an overhaul, and not just a visual one. Metaboxes need to be rethought and modernised. And in some cases, integrated into the editor. E.g. Look how Evernote does tags. No reason taxonomies in WP couldn't be with the editor, instead of down the sidebar. The sidebar should be for functions and settings. Anything to do with content should be in the main section.

I also I wish WP would finish something! They made a good start on the Media Library, and now stopped again. Where's media management? e.g.tags. The Media Library is wrongly named. It just be called the Media Black Hole. It's not friendly for re-use of media.

And to those here (and there), just because someone writes something provocative and that you disagree with, doesn't make it link-baiting. To call it link-baiting is not a valid argument.

All that said though, the new kids on the block - Medium and Ghost - are not necessarily successful because of any fault in WP. It's more that we all like "shiny and new". We all like to try new things.

Both though are blogging platforms only. That is just a subset of what WP is. That allows them to trade on simplicity. But how long does that last? Ask Posterous.