WordPress powers 43.6% of the entire internet. It runs The New York Times, Microsoft, Disney, and the White House. Fortune 500 companies trust it with mission-critical infrastructure handling millions of monthly visitors. Over 810 million websites are built on WordPress, with approximately 500 new sites launching daily. It has become the default choice for enterprise digital publishing.
Meanwhile, SixApart, once WordPress’s primary competitor, has faded so completely that most people under 30 have never heard of it. TypePad shut down in September 2025 after 22 years of decline. Movable Type survives only as a niche product serving primarily Japanese markets.
This represents the complete vindication of one of the blogging industry’s most controversial predictions. In November 2006, when WordPress.com had just launched and TypePad still dominated hosted blogging, the headline “WordPress goes enterprise while SixApart cries in a dark corner” seemed inflammatory. One Japanese blogger called it “煽り過ぎ” (too provocative). At the time, they had a point. SixApart was still a major player. TypePad was functional and profitable. Movable Type had a loyal developer community.
But that 2006 headline wasn’t exaggeration. It was prophecy.
What was happening in November 2006
To understand why that headline seemed so bold, you need to understand the moment. WordPress.com, Automattic’s hosted blogging service, had launched earlier that year as a direct competitor to TypePad. The race was on.
KnownNow, a vendor specializing in enterprise solutions, had just announced WordPress Enterprise Edition, bringing enterprise-grade features and support to the platform. This marked WordPress’s first serious push beyond individual bloggers and small sites into corporate territory.
The numbers told an interesting story. WordPress.com was catching up to TypePad in the hosted blogging market. Not overtaking, just catching up. But the trajectory mattered more than the snapshot. TypePad was losing ground in its home territory, the one market where SixApart should have been unbeatable.
Meanwhile, Movable Type, SixApart’s flagship self-hosted product, was still dealing with fallout from the 2004 licensing controversy. The community hadn’t forgotten. WordPress was absorbing developers and users who’d fled when SixApart tried to monetize what had functioned as open-source software.
The blogging platform wars were in full swing. SixApart had venture capital backing, multiple products, and market leadership. WordPress had community momentum and an open-source philosophy. In November 2006, betting against SixApart seemed contrarian at best, inflammatory at worst.
That’s what made the call bold. Not that WordPress would succeed, but that SixApart would fail so completely they’d end up “crying in a dark corner.” That seemed like hyperbole. It turned out to be understatement.
The decision that split two futures
In 2004, SixApart introduced Movable Type 3.0 with new licensing restrictions. What had functioned as effectively open-source software became unmistakably commercial. Users who’d built their digital presence on Movable Type suddenly faced license fees for something they’d treated as foundational infrastructure.
The blogging community revolted. Not because people opposed paying for software, but because the shift represented a fundamental betrayal of expectations. These weren’t casual users. They were the early adopters who’d evangelized Movable Type, written documentation, and built the ecosystem that made it valuable in the first place.
WordPress became the refuge. Matt Mullenweg’s fork of b2/cafelog was relatively unknown at the time, but it offered what displaced Movable Type users desperately needed: certainty that their publishing platform wouldn’t be yanked away by licensing changes.
By the time SixApart reversed course in 2007, releasing Movable Type 4.0 as open source, the community had moved on. As TechCrunch observed, the 2004 licensing controversy was “a tipping point that delivered WordPress from relative obscurity to being the popular blogging CMS it is today.”
The technical superiority of Movable Type was never in question. What was in question was whether you could trust a company that had already changed the rules once not to change them again. That question never got a satisfying answer.
What “enterprise” actually meant in 2006 (and what it means now)
When Blog Herald called WordPress’s enterprise move in 2006, it wasn’t based on Fortune 500 adoption, that came later. It was recognizing something more fundamental: WordPress’s architecture naturally scaled upward. The flexibility that let hobby bloggers customize themes enabled corporations to build complex digital ecosystems.
The 2006 article caught heat for overstating WordPress’s enterprise credentials. Fair enough, at that moment, major corporations weren’t rushing to WordPress. But the foundation was being laid. WordPress.com had just launched. The plugin ecosystem was expanding. The community was growing exponentially.
Today, the enterprise adoption is undeniable. Disney manages multiple digital properties through WordPress. General Motors, UPS, Best Buy, and Microsoft run corporate sites on the platform. The White House, Harvard, and major government agencies trust it with their infrastructure. These aren’t small implementations, they’re mission-critical systems handling millions of monthly visitors.
According to W3Techs data from early 2025, WordPress maintains 43.6% of all websites and a commanding 62.8% of the CMS market. Among the top one million websites, approximately 30% run on WordPress. WooCommerce powers over 4.6 million online stores.
But here’s what makes WordPress’s enterprise story remarkable: it didn’t abandon its roots to get there. The blogger-friendly core remained. The enterprise features extended rather than replaced the accessible foundation. You can still spin up a WordPress site in minutes, and you can also build systems that serve a billion pageviews.
SixApart never figured out how to serve both audiences. They chased enterprise dollars with Movable Type while trying to maintain TypePad for casual users. The split strategy satisfied neither market.
How the mighty fell (and kept falling)
After the licensing debacle, SixApart pursued a scattershot strategy that screamed desperation rather than vision. They acquired LiveJournal in 2005. Launched the Vox social platform. Bought micro-blogging service Pownce. Each move made sense in isolation. Together, they suggested a company that had lost its narrative.
TypePad limped along, struggling to justify monthly fees against increasingly sophisticated free alternatives. By 2020, new registrations had stopped. The 2025 shutdown announcement surprised no one, it was a mercy killing of a service that had been functionally dead for years.
The contrast with WordPress is stark. While SixApart jumped from acquisition to acquisition, WordPress focused obsessively on improving the core product. The plugin ecosystem expanded. The Gutenberg block editor represented the biggest interface overhaul in platform history. WordPress.com offered commercial services that enhanced rather than undermined the open-source foundation.
What SixApart lost wasn’t just market share, it was relevance. By 2010, when the company merged with VideoEgg to form SAY Media, Movable Type had become a niche product serving primarily Japanese markets. The broader conversation about digital publishing had moved on, and WordPress was defining it.
The 2006 “crying in a dark corner” line seemed harsh at the time. In retrospect, it was generous. At least crying implies presence. What actually happened was worse: SixApart became so irrelevant that most people under 30 have never heard of it.
Why open source won (and keeps winning)
WordPress’s enterprise dominance isn’t about features, plenty of proprietary CMSs offer sophisticated functionality. It’s about ownership and control. When your content management system is open source, you’re betting on code that exists independently of any company’s fortunes. When it’s proprietary, you’re betting on a vendor’s viability, strategic direction, and pricing whims.
Fortune 500 companies adopt WordPress because they can audit the codebase, hire developers who understand it, and modify functionality without vendor permission. If Automattic disappeared tomorrow, WordPress would continue. The same couldn’t be said for proprietary alternatives, as TypePad users learned the hard way.
The plugin ecosystem matters enormously. With over 60,000 extensions in the WordPress repository, enterprises find solutions for virtually any requirement or commission custom development from a global talent pool. This flexibility accelerates deployment and eliminates single-vendor dependency.
Community-driven innovation beats quarterly roadmaps. When generative AI tools emerged, WordPress plugins appeared almost immediately. When new web standards are adopted, community implementation happens rapidly. This responsiveness exists because thousands of developers have stakes in WordPress’s success, not because a product team scheduled features quarters in advance.
The SEO advantages compound everything else. WordPress’s clean architecture and extensive optimization tools have made it the default for content-driven strategies. Enterprise-grade optimization through plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math would require significant custom development on proprietary platforms.
SixApart never understood this dynamic. They saw open source as a business model problem rather than a strategic advantage. By the time they recognized their mistake, the market had already decided.
The misconceptions that still persist
Despite overwhelming enterprise adoption, WordPress battles perceptions formed during its blogging-platform era. Critics point to security vulnerabilities, performance concerns, and scalability limitations. These criticisms reveal outdated understanding more than current reality.
Security concerns are legitimate, WordPress’s popularity makes it a target. But the vulnerability landscape has less to do with WordPress core and more with abandoned plugins and outdated installations. Enterprises mitigate risks through managed hosting, careful plugin vetting, regular updates, and security services. The attacks that made headlines exploited severely outdated installations, not current WordPress code.
Performance criticisms miss the mark entirely. A poorly configured WordPress site can be slow, but so can any poorly implemented platform. Enterprise WordPress deployments use sophisticated caching, CDNs, and optimized infrastructure that routinely handle millions of monthly visitors. Performance ceiling is determined by hosting architecture, not inherent WordPress limitations.
The notion that WordPress can’t handle complex workflows doesn’t survive contact with reality. The platform supports multisite installations managing hundreds of sites, granular user permissions for complex editorial structures, and comprehensive multilingual capabilities.
What’s actually challenging about WordPress at enterprise scale isn’t technical capability, it’s operational discipline. The platform’s extensibility creates opportunities for technical debt without proper governance. These are implementation challenges, not platform limitations.
What that 2006 headline got right
The “WordPress goes enterprise while SixApart cries in a dark corner” headline wasn’t exaggerated. It was prophetic. It recognized fundamental dynamics that others dismissed or ignored:
Platform philosophy matters more than features. SixApart built superior technology but paired it with a business model that alienated its community. WordPress built good-enough technology with a model that empowered its users. The latter won decisively.
Community beats control. Every WordPress site added to collective knowledge. Every plugin extended capabilities for everyone. Every developer familiar with the platform increased available talent. These network effects compounded exponentially. SixApart’s proprietary approach couldn’t generate similar momentum.
Monetization through services beats monetization through restrictions. Automattic built a thriving business by offering services that enhanced an open core. SixApart tried to extract revenue by limiting what users could do. The market voted overwhelmingly for the former.
Early signals matter. In 2006, WordPress.com catching up to TypePad in hosting wasn’t just a data point, it was a warning sign. SixApart was losing ground in its home territory. The trajectory was clear to anyone willing to see it.
The Japanese blogger who called our 2006 piece “too inflammatory” was reacting to how bold it seemed at that moment. From a 2025 perspective, the remarkable thing is how restrained it was. We could have gone further. We could have predicted TypePad’s eventual shutdown, SixApart’s near-total irrelevance, and WordPress’s complete market dominance. We didn’t because it seemed too aggressive.
Turns out we weren’t aggressive enough.
The lesson that extends beyond CMS wars
The WordPress versus SixApart story offers lessons that transcend content management systems. It demonstrates how business models shape platform evolution and how community dynamics determine long-term viability.
When you choose control over collaboration, you might win short-term revenue but lose long-term relevance. When you restrict rather than enable, you might protect intellectual property but sacrifice ecosystem growth. When you prioritize extraction over empowerment, you might boost quarterly numbers but destroy strategic positioning.
SixApart made rational business decisions at every turn. Enforce licensing to generate revenue. Acquire platforms to diversify offerings. Pursue enterprise customers for larger contracts. Each decision made sense individually. Collectively, they amounted to a catastrophic strategic failure.
WordPress made decisions that seemed risky or even irrational from a conventional business perspective. Keep the core open source. Enable anyone to modify and extend the platform. Build commercial services that enhance rather than replace the free offering. These decisions created vulnerability. Competitors could fork the code, users could avoid paid services, and control remained distributed rather than centralized.
But those “vulnerable” choices generated the network effects that made WordPress unbeatable. The platform that anyone could use, modify, and extend became the platform that everyone did use, modify, and extend. The ecosystem that emerged was more valuable than any single company could have built through proprietary control.
Where we are now
WordPress faces challenges SixApart never encountered. No-code website builders offer drag-and-drop simplicity. Headless CMS platforms promise API-first architectures. Shopify and Wix compete aggressively in specific verticals. The competitive landscape is more complex than it was in 2006.
Yet WordPress’s position appears more secure than ever, precisely because it avoided the proprietary trap that killed SixApart. The platform continues evolving, Gutenberg represents the most significant interface overhaul in WordPress history, moving toward block-based content creation while maintaining backward compatibility.
The real question isn’t whether WordPress will maintain dominance, it’s what kind of internet we’re building. As platforms consolidate and closed ecosystems proliferate, WordPress represents something increasingly rare: digital infrastructure that belongs to everyone and no one.
That 2006 Blog Herald headline captured something essential. WordPress was going enterprise, but it was doing so on its own terms, remaining open, accessible, and community-driven. SixApart wasn’t literally crying in a corner, but it was making choices that would lead to obsolescence.
Twenty years later, the verdict is clear. The headline wasn’t exaggerated. It was exactly right. WordPress won not by having the best technology, it won by having the best philosophy. It won by trusting its community more than SixApart trusted its customers. It won by enabling rather than restricting, by opening rather than closing, by collaborating rather than controlling.
SixApart isn’t crying in a dark corner anymore. It doesn’t exist enough to cry. And that’s the lesson: when you choose control over community, when you restrict rather than enable, when you extract rather than empower, you don’t just lose market share. You lose your reason for existing at all.
