Prediction

WordPress and Scribd will go the way of the dinosaurs…

These guys led the charge but they are stuck in ‘1.0 paradigm’.

They just don’t get their customer’s needs and arrogantly rely on their market dominance.

My guess is that the management of these companies simply don’t use the products and never have. It’s one of the risk of using head-hunters to replace the founders – they find ‘analyst and investor’-friendly grey-beards that simply don’t understand the product. This is a guess but what else can explain it?

But they will be eaten up by 2.0 and 3.0 competitors in a flash.

Issuu is already eating Scribd’s lunch and Scribd’s reaction? To remove just about all author stats. Really?

WordPress is a byzantine tangle of interdependent code. Its laughably bad this spaghetti junction of sub-routines (it feels that old). Have you tried using the editor on a long document? Don’t – it just ignores you. There are half a dozen ways to look at your dashboard of control functions – each of them with different levels of control. In the end we all just get used to meandering through this rat-race in a way that works for us, but we daren’t try anything different.

Which brings us to Google…have you ever used Google+? Probably not – it’s rubbish for some undefinable reason..actually because it is an in-house development. Apart from search all their good stuff was bought as a working solution.

If you have a website you will have used Google’s admin and analytics tools. Sweet bejesus, it feels like there are dozens of admin pages that are all interconnected in some psychedelic fashion that only one geek in a dark cave at Google really understands. It is just so bad.

Google is inherently web 1.0. When they buy new stuff and bolt it on it really only depresses the value of the user experience because we all then have to use Google’s ‘integrated back-end’, i.e. arsehole, of an admin ‘system’.

Truth will out. Rant over.