In reply to Jeff Yablon.

Hey Jeff,

re: growth - Yea, I'm not sure how quickly it would/will happen, but I guess my thinking is... what will that other 75% be running on? A certain amount is going to be truly custom stuff, and then there are SquareSpace type stuff. I don't know what percentage they make up. But, the rest seems to be static stuff built with various old tools and Adobe stuff, which eventually people will discover is a bad idea. What do they switch to? It would seem WP will pick up some of that, even if they do little to nothing (so long as they don't head the wrong direction).

And, for all the stuff I might complain about, WP has gotten more robust, easier for the non-techie, w/ better hosting options, and most of it's deficiencies can be filled with a bit of know-how (ex: I complain a lot about the comment system, but there's Disqus... it's just more a matter of principal).

re: look outward - I agree there. I wrote a comment here on another post regarding that the other day. IMO, the community and Automattic are too developer/inward focused. My complaint about the comment system is a symptom, for example. Basically, it's good enough for the developers, and just considered something to be fixed by 3rd party stuff from what I understand. Many aspects of WP are like that.

I guess that's where JetPack is outward looking in filling those holes with a known quantity, right from the trusted source. The problem is that, IMO, the JetPack solutions aren't often good enough (comments, again, are a great example).

re: REST makes WP obsolete - I don't know a whole lot about it, but I'm not sure I get that. Does it mean the backend needs to go away? I see it more as a new front-end tool. I guess that's what you're saying too... but is that a bad thing? (Why would it hurt the platform or growth?)

The way I see it - even if it always has to connect to WordPress.com - is that Automattic probably wants that traffic/data/connection. That's where the future value to them might be, not in forcing everyone onto WP.com. Be sure to listen to Chris' comments on this episode of the podcast if you haven't already.

My interest in it would be developing specific custom interfaces for particular tasks, primarily for internal clients. For example, instead of teaching someone how to go to WP Admin and create Woo Commerce products and such, make a simple 'tool' they just launch and add products. (I'm sure you get the power of that... but just for the sake of clarity.)

So, I'm not sure it's at the expense of the community, at least any more than say Google giving you search, or Facebook giving you an account, or Disqus giving you a comment system, etc. is at the expense of the community. It's an expense, of sorts, (i.e.: data collection, ad potential, etc.)... but seems a model the world is quite in love with. So, I'm not sure that will hurt WP's growth.