This morning I woke up thinking about a story I read yesterday that deserves more attention and celebration. Brandon Kelly, the creator of the Craft content management system, posted this news with little fanfare on Mastodon:
Mind-blowing stat to kick off 2024: CraftCMS is now the 7th most popular CMS among the top 5K domains worldwide, according to Cloudflare’s 2023 trends report.
His message was accompanied by a chart showing WordPress at the top with 53.3% market share and Craft sitting at a humble 1.7%. In between were more juggernauts like Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal, Contentful, Hubspot, and Squarespace.
Even if you’re not a developer, you’ve likely heard of Squarespace as they advertise like crazy on television, streaming, and just about every podcast ever made (except for Sprints & Milestones). And when I say crazy, I mean this year they spent “over $100 million on advertising in digital, print, and national TV in the last year” according to MediaRadar. And if you’re curious, like I am, that staggering amount of money is one-tenth of Squarespace’s expected revenue for 2023.
Craft is highly likely not on track for that kind of revenue and I’m pretty sure I could bet my house and retirement that Brandon is not spending $100M on advertising, and yet his company is within .1% of Squarespace’s influence on the top five thousand websites on the planet. In addition, almost all of those competitors have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to get to where they are. Craft has been bootstrapped since day one and their team is less than twenty people.
Think about that for a minute.
To be fair, Squarespace’s target market is individuals and tiny companies that sell products and services. That said, for a company that is a fraction of a fraction in size of its closest rival in this report, Brandon and his team are clearly the winners. It is a remarkable achievement for the products they create, their product strategy (the products they don’t create), and their obvious commitment to the thousands of people who create these top five thousand websites with Craft.
Folks, this is the Internet I signed up for! This is exactly the type of business story I want to see, read, and hear more of in the years to come. It’s a great reminder that the independent web is still alive and kicking, and poised for a strong comeback. Maybe it’s time to spin Independents Day back up and celebrate.
➵
This morning I happened across a new publication called Futurism. Doesn’t it always make the day better when you come across a new journal?
Anyhoo, scrolling through the homepage this headline caught my eye—Sam Altman's Right-Hand Man Says AI Is Overhyped. Sam being the Sam who was fired from OpenAI, hired by Microsoft, quit his job at Microsoft, and went back to take over OpenAI all within 24 hours. Damn, the job market is so crazy stupid right now.
Back on topic. I love this statement about the state of AI and the Enterprise:
In an interview with CNBC, OpenAI COO and CEO Sam Altman's right-hand man Brad Lightcap said that certain aspects of AI are "overhyped," especially when it comes to the sky-high expectations of the company's enterprise AI customers.
"And there’s almost never a silver bullet answer there — there’s never one thing you can do with AI that solves that problem in full," he said. "And I think that’s just a testament to the world being really big and messy, and that these systems are still evolving, they’re still really in their infancy."
While I was at IBM I worked with a few engineers on Watson AI-powered projects. I learned a lot, especially their disdain for the people in marketing. At the time, IBM ran a lot of advertising featuring Watson as a simple device that could solve all kinds of very complex challenges easily.
Customers were excited and came to IBM in droves with massive problems expecting to hook up the magic box and solve all of them within seconds. In reality, Watson couldn’t do many of the things it was advertised to do because it wasn’t mature enough and almost all of the time the customer's legacy systems were in such a state that simply hooking up AI wasn’t an option, and it’s still not. Mostly because the data on the customers end is so messy and scrambled across so many systems that the cost-benefit doesn't work out.
This left the engineers in a very awkward position of having to burst all of the bubbles and bring customers back to Earth as gently as possible. Nobody likes doing that, least of all, engineers who are so often put in that position.
It’s interesting that seven years later, the problem still stands. AI is not a silver bullet and engineers are still left to the task of busting bubbles. Some things never change.
➵