Mullenweg responded to them, saying he is “100% certain this will drive more up-market consulting in the future” to consultants who handle larger projects and potentially bring more business to plugin and theme developers. He also noted that Bluehost’s full service product is a similar solution and that services like Web.com have been competing in this space for awhile.
So WordPress is getting into the low cost website game. Or maybe not, maybe they’re just referring those services out? It is a bit hard to say. But either way, this comment from Matt Mullenweg comes off as a bit disingenous. The issue with how the service is positioned — Built by WordPress.com — is a matter of branding.
The rest of the world outside of the WordPress community doesn’t decouple WordPress and WordPress.com, nor should they have to. So any service that Automattic launches into the ehter comes off as the official entry, so to enter a market with such slim margins and potentially crowd out the community doesn’t have a great feeling to it, even if the general point is well taken.
