131–140 of 157 posts
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It is virtually guaranteed no one will use domain names or web browsers or blogs or websites in 100 years.
What would they use?
It’s just a money grab for anyone who will fall for it. 100 years is long enough that the consequences of failure are nil. Nobody who is pushing this program will be alive to deal with any fallout. It reminds me of the subtle attitude of people making poor engineering decisions because they’ll be long gone by the time payment comes due.
It is virtually guaranteed no one will use domain names or web browsers or blogs or websites in 100 years.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20180914182353/https://www.inter...
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Wordpress.com can change their technology without becoming something else. They own the Wordpress trademark just like NYT owns theirs. Somebody who buys a 100-year registration from Wordpress will have the service delivered on whatever Wordpress has become by 2123.
People don't go to wordpress.com because of the name or the content on the site. People use WP because it's a technology they understand and can put to a particular use. If that changes, said people may not use it anymore. If the NYT decides to change their content delivery platform to, literally, whatever, people would still go read the NYT. Their audience doesn't care. If WP becomes a different product (a static si…
You're imagining this change happening in a world where people still care about Wordpress.
Try imagining instead, a world where Wordpress is already a dead technology that nobody would use for a greenfield project, and it's only "legacy" sites that haven't been modified in 10 years (but which are owned by brick-and-mortar companies that continue faithfully paying the hosting bills every month) that are still hosted on Wordpress.com.
Can you not then see the value in some company buying up Wordpress.com, and migrating its customers over to a Wordpress-compatibility-shim over their own service that's based on a not-dead technology?
Anyway, If you get this, don't be surprised if it only lasts a decade or two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is about Wordpress.com selling 100-year registrations. Their platform is whatever they call “Wordpress”. In the same way, NYT on a phone app is conceptually the same NYT as the one printed in 1923, even if almost nothing in the production pipeline is the same.
The NYT can change any of the tech they use and still be the NYT in 100 years. Wordpress is the technology, if it changes, it becomes something else. That's the difference, explained.
Just because Wordpress 6.3 is a php monstrosity with a security-disaster-riddled ecosystem doesn't mean Wordpress 12 has to use php and can't have sandboxed extensions. For all we know, Wordpress 12 could be a fancy frontend for a static site generator (marketed as "ultra-caching" or whatever)
Unless they made some special deal with ICANN, what Wordpress is almost certainly doing is the same thing Network Solutions does (or did? [1]) for their 100 year registration product. Register it for 10 years, and then add more years every so often over the next 100 years to keep pushing the expiration date out (but never farther out than 10 years) until the expiration date reaches 100 years from the start.
[1] I'm not sure Network Solutions still offers 100 years. I just checked and it only offered up to 10 years for the domain itself. It offered up to 100 years on some of their add-ons such as their private registration option.
(Put loosely, what if they blow it all on executive bonuses the first few years of ramp-up, run out of suckers, and then have no funds to actually provide the service for the next 97 years. I'm not an accountant, but I'd guess not a lot of businesses would want to have 97 years of obligations without recurring revenue, and actually intending and able to honor those obligations.)
What about treat it more like a life insurance policy: you pay monthly/yearly premiums as long as you're alive, and the "lifetime" only kicks in when you die? And the dotcom company covers the "lifetime" part with its own ample insurance, from some company that's been around since the figurative stone age, and won't likely fail until the next stone age?
That spreads out recurring revenue for the company into something plausibly sustainable longer, increases the pool of sales prospects who could afford to buy into this (sales is a different matter), and increases the chance that this service will actually be provided in the end.
(Assuming that they want this to work, and it's not a PR tactic to promote a visionary CEO image.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is about Wordpress.com selling 100-year registrations. Their platform is whatever they call “Wordpress”. In the same way, NYT on a phone app is conceptually the same NYT as the one printed in 1923, even if almost nothing in the production pipeline is the same.
The NYT can change any of the tech they use and still be the NYT in 100 years. Wordpress is the technology, if it changes, it becomes something else. That's the difference, explained.
Yeah, I doubt this is going to be hold for 100 years. WordPress itself? Maybe, it's certainly not the kind of software that goes out of fashion in a year or two like many frameworks of the day. But a paid service that's supposed to last 100 years (or heck, longer than 10 years in general) is very unlikely to stick around anywhere near as long as that. Something like 99% of companies will flat out not exist by the nex…
A 100 years ago we didn’t have software. Oil was all the rage and had only started being massively available two decades ago. Ford had recently started. And IBM, then CTR, was just 12 years old. I wonder how things will look in another 100 years. Perhaps the web won’t have changed much. Perhaps the mere concept of a CMS or human-written software will be laughable. Unrelated, but funny enough to be worth mentioning, i…
And yeah things were very different back then, and will be in future too. I don't personally think we're ever going to be in a situation where no human written software will exist though. Human creativity and the ability to do things better don't seem to have too much in common (people still paint despite photography existing, plays are still performed despite film and television and people still work on games and software for systems released in the 80s and 90s simply because they can). But it may be niche at least.
$38k at 1% interest = $380 per year, forever. Current US Treasury rates are > 5%, meaning > $1900 per year. What is the overlap between people who have $38k disposable, don't realize this, and also think paying $38k for a Wordpress domain lease is a good idea? I can only assume this has to be some weird publicity stunt, which is probably quite clever, because here we are talking about Wordpress.
If inflation is persistent throughout the decade it might end up as a better deal but its a long shot for a small payoff.
Dear valued customers,
Due to unprecedented and frankly unforeseen inflation no really we couldn’t see that coming, we have decided that a small number of customers couldn’t be costing everyone else something, risking our whole company to go bankrupt, so we’ve decided to migrate every Squatting Domain to our new service at squatting.wordpress.com/[your account name]. Proud to offer the best customer service for a century!