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Episode 063: How to Get Enterprise to Adopt WordPress as a Software
If you watched our previous episode on why WordPress developers get paid less, we talked a lot about how WordPress missing out on enterprise work, which is where a lot of money in software / web development is. This week we continue that topic by talking about why WordPress isn’t getting that kind of work, and the conversation led to some hard truth conclusions.
Enterprise & Open Source
While most of the top tier developers you might know and love today are very fond of open source, big businesses (Fortune level) have been much slower to adopt whole open source platforms. While this isn’t a fact across all businesses, it is fact that they are more readily to accept a library to use to build something vs. a whole platform. Take for example something we talk a lot about, JavaScript frameworks. React, Angular, and Vue have been adopted by enterprise companies for a while now, and that has helped them to flourish rapidly, however you don’t see whole platforms built off of them being used.
WordPress suffers from this greatly. It still has a stigma with more senior or removed tech executives as a blog (only) platform and with that a slew of other stereotypes like security issues. These are mostly just false stereotypes nowadays, plus as I said during the podcast, most enterprise level teams have separate teams for things like security, tech ops, etc. If you are a smaller bootstrapped team, then maybe not, but finding a good stack for performance and security is not hard to find, plus there are many hosts that specialize in enterprise.
Ultimately the battle of open source vs. closed source still rages on. As tech companies have taken over the more “old school” industries open source has definitely seen a large uptick in usage, but a lot of the VERY large conglomerates are still hesitant.
Politics & Bureaucracy
Some of the most frustrating things to deal with when it comes to enterprise, is the politics and bureaucracy that comes with it. WordPress will ultimately get lost in the shuffle because as a software, it doesn’t have representatives that wine and dine enterprise clients, or go to enterprise trade shows. Yes an agency who builds with WordPress might show up, but when you look at the CMS landscape, there are many companies you’ve never heard of that just live off of a crappy CMS they sold to 1-2 enterprise clients and charge more monthly per user than you make annually.
There are many other reasons why one software or even a custom internal project may get chosen over WordPress even when WordPress is a great choice, and while frustrating, not much we can do about it.
WordPress Developers Aren’t Good Enough?
I’m not saying all WordPress developers, but Carl brought up a good point. The average WordPress developer may not be skilled enough in what enterprise wants, therefore, why would they choose WordPress? I know this sounds like some weird logic, but it is plausible in the enterprise realm.
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If you watched our previous episode on why WordPress developers get paid less, we talked a lot about how WordPress missing out on enterprise work, which is where a lot of money in software / web development is. This week we continue that topic by talking about why WordPress isn’t getting that kind of work, and the conversation led to some hard truth conclusions.
Enterprise & Open Source
While most of the top tier developers you might know and love today are very fond of open source, big businesses (Fortune level) have been much slower to adopt whole open source platforms. While this isn’t a fact across all businesses, it is fact that they are more readily to accept a library to use to build something vs. a whole platform. Take for example something we talk a lot about, JavaScript frameworks. React, Angular, and Vue have been adopted by enterprise companies for a while now, and that has helped them to flourish rapidly, however you don’t see whole platforms built off of them being used.
WordPress suffers from this greatly. It still has a stigma with more senior or removed tech executives as a blog (only) platform and with that a slew of other stereotypes like security issues. These are mostly just false stereotypes nowadays, plus as I said during the podcast, most enterprise level teams have separate teams for things like security, tech ops, etc. If you are a smaller bootstrapped team, then maybe not, but finding a good stack for performance and security is not hard to find, plus there are many hosts that specialize in enterprise.
Ultimately the battle of open source vs. closed source still rages on. As tech companies have taken over the more “old school” industries open source has definitely seen a large uptick in usage, but a lot of the VERY large conglomerates are still hesitant.
Politics & Bureaucracy
Some of the most frustrating things to deal with when it comes to enterprise, is the politics and bureaucracy that comes with it. WordPress will ultimately get lost in the shuffle because as a software, it doesn’t have representatives that wine and dine enterprise clients, or go to enterprise trade shows. Yes an agency who builds with WordPress might show up, but when you look at the CMS landscape, there are many companies you’ve never heard of that just live off of a crappy CMS they sold to 1-2 enterprise clients and charge more monthly per user than you make annually.
There are many other reasons why one software or even a custom internal project may get chosen over WordPress even when WordPress is a great choice, and while frustrating, not much we can do about it.
WordPress Developers Aren’t Good Enough?
I’m not saying all WordPress developers, but Carl brought up a good point. The average WordPress developer may not be skilled enough in what enterprise wants, therefore, why would they choose WordPress? I know this sounds like some weird logic, but it is plausible in the enterprise realm.