Byrne Reese, a product manager who spent four years at Six Apart, once laid out a useful explanation for why WordPress ultimately became the winner in the blogging platform race. His comparison mainly focused on WordPress and its most important rival at the time, Movable Type. The argument is not simply that WordPress was technically better. In fact, in several places he suggests the opposite: Movable Type had strong design, strong features, and better professional support. WordPress won for a more complicated set of reasons.
The license change that pushed users away
The most decisive moment came in 2004, when Movable Type changed its licensing policy. That decision angered a large part of its user base and drove many people toward WordPress.
This was probably the single biggest reason WordPress became the eventual winner. Movable Type may have had better design, more polished features, and stronger technical support, but it was suddenly competing against a product that was completely free. WordPress was open source, and to users that meant not only free of charge, but also free from the uncertainty of a shifting commercial license.
Movable Type had also started out free, but its licensing strategy became unpredictable. That uncertainty mattered. Once users began to doubt whether the platform would remain friendly to them, WordPress became the safer choice. Movable Type later released an open-source version in 2007, but by then the damage had already been done.
WordPress was easier to install
WordPress also won because getting it running was simple. Its famous installation process could be completed in less than five minutes. Compared with Movable Type, this was a major advantage for ordinary users, hosting providers, and anyone trying to recommend a blogging platform to others.
With WordPress, users barely needed to touch complicated web server settings. Installation was not the only pleasant part of the experience either. Upgrading WordPress, installing plugins, and changing themes were all handled with a level of convenience that made the platform feel approachable.
That ease of use mattered more than feature count. Even when WordPress had fewer features than Movable Type, people still preferred it because it was easier to start, easier to maintain, and easier to extend.
PHP helped bring more people in
In theory, the programming language behind a product should not matter much to most users. Very few people install a blogging platform and then immediately begin editing PHP or Perl source code. Yet in practice, language did matter.
WordPress was written in PHP, while Movable Type was written in Perl. Users and developers seemed to feel more comfortable with PHP. Perl carried a certain intimidating reputation, while PHP felt more accessible. That accessibility encouraged more people to participate in the WordPress ecosystem, creating plugins, themes, and customizations.
PHP also had practical advantages. It generally required a lower technical threshold for maintenance than Perl, and more hosting providers supported PHP by default. In workplace settings, technical staff were more likely to recommend PHP-based systems to their managers than Perl-based ones. That made WordPress easier to deploy and easier to justify.
There is also a strong case that WordPress’s design deserves part of the credit here. Among blogging systems, it offered especially good support for customization. PHP helped, but the structure of WordPress made it particularly friendly to the plugin-and-theme model that later became central to its success.
The community became a force of its own
WordPress’s community was one of its greatest strengths. It was large, energetic, and unusually productive. The number of people building around WordPress gave the platform a momentum that was hard for competitors to match.
Just as important, a healthy economy grew up around that community. Premium themes became a real business. More and more people were able to earn money by designing, selling, and supporting WordPress themes. That gave contributors a reason to keep investing their time and energy back into the ecosystem.
This created a virtuous cycle: a bigger community produced more extensions and themes; more extensions and themes attracted more users; more users created more commercial opportunities; and those opportunities encouraged more developers and designers to contribute.
WordPress was not tightly controlled from the center
Another notable point is that many of WordPress’s most important strengths were shaped by the community rather than by strict central planning. The platform did not become powerful because a company carefully selected the perfect license, programming language, ecosystem, and culture from the top down.
In the case of WordPress, many of these outcomes emerged organically. The community made decisions, filled gaps, created tools, and pushed the platform forward. That looser structure made WordPress feel less like a vendor-controlled product and more like a shared project.
A product people wanted to defend
WordPress also benefited from a kind of emotional loyalty that Movable Type never managed to inspire in the same way.
In its early days, WordPress did not overstate what it was. It did not position itself as something grander than its actual capabilities. Its low-key attitude helped build goodwill. People liked that it seemed modest, practical, and open.
At the same time, Six Apart’s attacks on WordPress backfired. Instead of damaging WordPress, they damaged Six Apart’s credibility. Users who might otherwise have stayed neutral began to sympathize with WordPress. The platform’s modest image, combined with the perception that it was being unfairly attacked, turned ordinary users into defenders.
That is how a product becomes more than a tool. People developed an attachment to WordPress. They began to feel that supporting WordPress meant fighting for something. In that story, Six Apart was not just a competitor; it became the perfect enemy.
Automattic aggressively encouraged switching
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, also played a direct role in moving users away from Six Apart’s products. This part of the story is not especially flattering.
Many loyal Movable Type and TypePad users reportedly received calls from Automattic employees encouraging them to switch to WordPress. The campaign was persistent enough that Reese joked he would be rich if each of those users had given him a dollar.
Automattic used every possible method to make migration easier. In some cases, it even offered free hosting and assigned engineers to help users move their systems over to WordPress. Once a user successfully migrated, that case could then be turned into a success story to persuade others to make the same move.
It was aggressive, but it was effective. WordPress did not merely wait for users to arrive; it actively pulled them across.
The Apperceptive acquisition weakened Six Apart’s own community
Six Apart’s acquisition of Apperceptive was not necessarily a bad business move. It even contributed to meaningful profit growth. The problem was what happened around the acquisition.
Afterward, Six Apart hired many smart and creative people from its surrounding community into the company. On the surface, that sounds like a win. But those people had previously been part of the broader ecosystem that made Six Apart’s products stronger from the outside.
Once they joined the company, their work also began to overlap with the kind of professional services that Six Apart had been known for. Worse, the community itself was weakened. Some of its most capable and influential figures had been absorbed into the company, leaving fewer leaders outside it.
The result was that Six Apart increasingly had to fight alone, while WordPress continued to benefit from a broad, independent community.
Six Apart lost focus
The simplest criticism of Six Apart is that it spread itself too thin. Its attention was divided across too many products. In short: it lacked focus.
Had Six Apart concentrated fully on one product—whether TypePad or Movable Type—the outcome might have been different. WordPress probably still would have become the most popular blogging platform, but it would have faced a much stronger rival. The competition would likely have forced both sides to keep improving through innovation and technical progress.
Instead, Six Apart’s divided strategy weakened its competitiveness at exactly the moment WordPress was gaining speed.
Was WordPress really the best product?
The broader question remains: among WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, Simple CMS, TypePad, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and other publishing tools, was WordPress truly the best product?
Reese’s answer was no. He still considered Movable Type the better product, and it continued to be the preferred choice for many commercial companies. That distinction is important. Winning the market does not always mean being the best-designed or most technically superior product.
WordPress won because it was free, open, easy to install, easy to extend, supported by PHP, backed by a massive community, and helped by the mistakes of its strongest competitor.
For most blog users, the actual requirements were never especially complicated. They needed to publish posts, receive comments, add a few widgets to a sidebar, change the look of the site, and ideally get some help attracting readers. For that kind of user, hosted blogging services from large portals could even be a better fit than running an independent installation.
Most people do not want to build and maintain their own dedicated blog system. The group that does want to do that has always leaned more technical. WordPress happened to suit that group extremely well.
That does not mean WordPress was perfect. Its administration interface could still feel too complex for non-technical computer users. Performance was not always ideal. There were many plugins, but only a small number of truly excellent ones. Even so, WordPress met the needs of the people most willing to install, customize, and promote their own publishing platform—and that was enough to change the market.