

Microsoft Announces Partnership With WordPress.com - bond
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2010/09/27/microsoft-announces-partnership-with-wordpress-com/

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bl4k
That article is so terribly written I couldn't get to the end. Here is the
story from the source:

[http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...](http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/09/27/wordpress-
com-and-windows-live-partnering-together-and-providing-an-upgrade-
for-30-million-windows-live-spaces-customers.aspx)

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barkingcat
Matt has actually been steering Wordpress in a very vendor neutral way. As
much as Wordpress is free opensource software that usually runs on unixes, it
has always been windows friendly - and runs on the azure platform as a launch
partner.

It's not hard to see why Microsoft would want to continue their partnership.

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remi
Official post from WordPress.com:
[http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/welcome-windows-
live...](http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/welcome-windows-live-spaces-
bloggers/)

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alphadog
I'm impressed by Matt Mullenweg. I think the folks over at Posterous could
learn a few things from him.

~~~
nopal
A quick Google tells me that he's the founding developer of WordPress, but
that's all I know of him. Could you elaborate on your statement?

~~~
zacharyz
He is the CEO of both wordpress.org (maintainers of the open source
distribution of wordpress) and automattic (wordpress.com). He is the main
visionary and final say on all features that are released.

Back in 2003 he forked an old blog tool called b2, then grew it until it
became one of the most versatile and healthy CMSs out there.

One of the things that has impressed me most about how he has run things is
that he is able to balance the creation of a hosted blogging platform
(wordpress.com) while respecting the needs and desires of those who wish to
own their own data and operate their own systems (think about facebook vs
diaspora here).

I recently had a chance to meet him at the portland wordcamp. He was able to
answer both highly detailed questions (why is x implemented this way and how
will it be improved?) to big picture questions like how wordpress will
continue to develop to compete with the likes of tumblr as well as providing
the functionality of wordpress.com to everybody.

Overall he is one of those rare CEOs who is very much enlightened about all
aspects of the organization.

~~~
bl4k
Sorry to bust-up the love-in but Matt isn't the CEO of Wordpress.com, but Toni
Schneider is.

Also the open source project doesn't have a CEO. Matt is lead-dev at both.

Points still apply though, and Matt should get a ton of credit

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nhebb
When I ran WP on a Windows host, the biggest frustration I had was that so
many WP hacks required .htaccess. I don't know for sure if there's a market
out there for a Windows .htaccess emulator, but I'd bet there's a lot of
Windows shared hosting users that would love to see their hosts provide one.

~~~
cparedes
AFAIK, .htaccess files are strictly for Apache web servers - if you're even
using lighttpd or nginx, you're pretty much boned.

~~~
nhebb
That's why I said emulator. I should have searched before posting, but
apparently there is already at least one product on the market that does this
(Helicon Ape).

~~~
ary
Are you looking strictly for mod_rewrite syntax support in IIS?

<http://www.isapirewrite.com/>

More here: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60857/mod-rewrite-
equival...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60857/mod-rewrite-equivalent-
for-iis-7-0)

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lumisura
Finally Microsoft decided to stop investing in a bad tool and made a great
partnership. Too bad it took many years for it to happen. Hopefully they will
make the integration with Live profiles simple, much like what Google/Blogger
did. I would love to see Live Gallery features/plugins available for
Wordpress.

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troymc
I was browsing Wordpress.com (their home page) the other day and noticed that
the Windows Internet Explorer Blog was using Wordpress.com. That surprised me
a little. I figured they'd used Windows Live Spaces or some Microsoft-created
blogging system. Maybe they do both?

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zabraxias
A good choice for MS as long as they don't try to influence an "improvement"
of WP to .NET.

~~~
jasonlotito
Microsoft has been very supportive of the PHP community, and has worked to
ensure PHP runs well on Windows. While they have .NET, they do a lot to make
PHP apart of their architecture. This is, of course, a smart business move.

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d2viant
Does anybody think this will affect Jason Cohen's startup announcement this
morning that will sell WordPress hosting?

~~~
jharrison
I don't think it will. Jasons's new project isn't just run-of-the-mill WP
hosting. It's a cultivated WP environment with a different target than the
Windows Live platform, in my opinion.

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bad_user
Somewhat off-topic, but I've switched to Tumblr ... it does posts to Twitter /
Facebook automatically, and sometimes you just want to post a small snippet or
a picture.

After using it, Wordpress / Blogger seem kind of outdated.

~~~
trickjarrett
I love Tumblr and I love Wordpress. Tumblr has a lot of great features, but WP
is a very powerful engine. Far from perfect, but it is improving steadily.

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carson
Now if only Microsoft would move all their blogs to WordPress it would be a
complete win. I'm not sure if they use the same platform everywhere but some
of their blogs look and function badly.

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xsive
Why do I feel like my WP blog is suddenly contaminated?

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iuguy
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?

~~~
Jach
I was thinking they'd more than double the security holes.

But seriously, it's nice to see MS on a steadily better track record with open
source, and WordPress isn't a bad project. Hopefully it continues that way.

