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https://thewpminute.com/private-equity-and-the-soul-of-wordpress/
“After all, it’s not whether a firm can contribute to WordPress. It’s more about their willingness to make a commitment.
However, the limited-term nature of their investments may make this difficult. And what happens after they exit? There’s no guarantee that the next investment group will be good stewards.”
There’s a lot of talk about Silver Lake being the one ruining things, not WPE. But what has Silver Lake done so far to damage the WordPress community?
Sounds like a bunch of speculation so far. Or, maybe there’s insight we don’t know publicly yet?
Interesting article, in that they bring up Silver Lake having $102 billion in assets under management, but leaves out that one of Automattic’s backers is BlackRock which has $10 ***trillion*** in assets under management.
I don’t use WPE as a host these days, and I don’t use ACF all that often and what I use it with, I could replace with another solution if I so desired (maybe even a different CMS if I needed to), so Silver Lake has absolutely no impact on me.
Now if Automattic turns their attention to other hosting providers block .org access to more companies , then Automattic is affecting me.
It’s informed speculation haha. Very normal on a PE takeover that they want every action to directly add to “business value” and meanwhile Jason Bahl has said he’s been told in recent years to spend less time on open source.
However, what’s been super weird / unprofessional / high school mean girl about this whole affair isn’t calling out WPE / Silver Lake but the “you’re with us or them” war footing of Matt Mullenberg, and that blog post doesn’t address that.
>Private equity firms tend to notice when an ecosystem is thriving. It happens in every sector. Everything from healthcare, to housing to veterinary clinics is on their radar.
>They often enter a market by buying up successful businesses. They’re a natural match for entrepreneurs who are ready to sell.
Shouldn’t the “entrepreneurs” who sell their “community built” projects/companies to private equity companies, be held to the same standard as private equity companies?
I don’t blame them for taking the money, but it’s also disingenuous to blame private equity companies for destroying communities, when those same communities invite the private equity companies with open arms.
It also feels very biased when the focus is exclusively on WP Engine and Silver Lake, while Automattic itself is acting in a similar fashion of acquiring lots of companies, has had many investors of their own and have invested themselves in other companies. Is Silver Lake particular evil to justify turning a blind eye to the big picture?
Maybe the evidence is that private equity ruins everything it touches. Point to one instance where any industry has gotten better because of participation by their worldview of value extraction. Private equity is at the root of the current trend of shittification across so many contexts these days, including the WP ecosystem. So many long term WP projects have been scooped up into portfolios with the transition to ever increasing subscription based monetization which is so attractive to this investor class. WordPress is just another profit center to be dominated.
Weaponizing capital in every opportunity to extract value from the greater economy to the disadvantage of the rest of us is the business model of private equity. They used to be called corporate raiders, they do not introduce value into the industries which they enter. They have already targeted every industry humans cannot live without, diving up the cost of life across the board and funneling that wealth to their investors. They can only be trusted to serve their own interests, no matter the cost to the rest of humanity. In an endless stream of examples, the current trend of these funds [buying and managing emergency rooms](https://www.vox.com/health-care/374820/emergency-rooms-private-equity-hospitals-profits-no-surprises) is both shocking and exemplar of how they operate. WordPress as we know it will not exist in the future if left in the hands of this worldview.
This is why I will always support Matt in this and inevitable additional attempts for the private equity agenda to dominate the future of WordPress. I have far greater faith in the at times imperfect but sincere leadership of a single founder who has shepherded the project this far over the board of directors of a private equity holding company who only views WordPress as a revenue yielding asset. Post acquisition, WPE’s leadership serves at the whim and service of Silver Lake’s board no matter their internal sense of justice. Matt at an internal level still serves the community, which has manifested and been architected through his life’s most important work. At the ultimate level, Silver Lake’s true decision makers are legally beholden to shareholder profit even over the public good. They have no long term stake in this ecosystem like Matt does.
Even if WPE, from a limited perspective imo, offered a better argument in the current situation, they cannot be trusted to serve the greater good moving forward. WPE is no longer truly calling the shots in their own business, and its management team is drunk on private equity money and power. The future for all of us that faction has hidden inside their proposed solution of a fork within the ecosystem, at so many levels, serves interests which are already proven to turn everything they touch to shit.
>There’s a lot of talk about Silver Lake being the one ruining things, not WPE. But what has Silver Lake done so far to damage the WordPress community? Sounds like a bunch of speculation so far. Or, maybe there’s insight we don’t know publicly yet?
Correct. Because it’s private equity. Since it’s not publicly traded we’re not privy to how they run their businesses to the same extent.
I manage my own VPS and dedicated servers, so I’d never use something like WP Engine where the main selling point is convenience (I’d rather pay $10 for a root server on NetCup than $800+ for a “Core Ecommerce” plan on WP Engine).
I have come across the occasional rant about the support getting worse, but technically that’s a fairly common critique across most hosting platforms, and for all I know they could’ve been paired up with just one bad support agent before storming out.
As for server performance. I don’t know. I don’t even think they allow you to run your own benchmark scripts in the terminal to test it, and if that’s the case it would not be possible to determine whether or not the performance has dropped due to overselling or whatnot.
So what about the plugins? ACF and ACF Pro, I don’t use them, but someone made a point that they recently made it so that you can’t use ACF Pro if unless you have an active license, and that’s a change from before where they allowed you to use the old version of the plugin but you wouldn’t receive updates or support. If this is true then that’s very clearly sabotage for getting people back on the subscription, which I’d consider a red flag (because this is clearly not a developer decision).
Time will tell. But private equity’s nasty reputation is not unwarranted.