This is something that’s probably true of almost any industry, but when you read enough WordPress-based tweets, blogs, and so on, you start to notice a pattern:

  1. Someone releases a project – it could be a theme, it could be a plugin, it could be a site that’s aiming to cover some aspect of anything involving WordPress – it doesn’t really matter what type.
  2. Someone comes along makes a comment like “Why do we need [this] when we already have [that]?”

Maybe I’m missing something, but I do not get that mentality. At all.

Product Diversity

Having diversity in the product space is great. It shows that we have a lively development community in which competition exists. This forces all of us to up our game and solve problems in a creative manner in different ways than our, y’know, competition.

We’re forced to think more strategically, and we’re forced to think about ways in which we can provide another solution with different attributes to the same problem.

It’s a great time to be a part of something like this.

Product Diversity in WordPress

But the question still remains: When a similar product is released, we don’t only question it, people will literally say something about how pointless it is when something similar already exists.

There’s no need in calling out anyone specific as this is something that’s pervasive enough in this space that you don’t have to go far to find it and the point isn’t about who’s saying what, but it’s what about what’s being said. Why is it such a problem that there are similar, competing products?

Perhaps a working analogy would be to look at all of, say, the different brands of similar foods in our grocery stores, our similar-yet-competitive devices, similar books (think The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, etc.), similar furniture, similar cars, and so on and so on forever it seems.

Having similar-yet-slightly-different types of projects available is not a bad thing. Though I realize this may be a matter of difference in economic philosophy (which is something I know next-to-nothing about), I love the idea that we have choice and I want to see that continue.

So as many projects that are available that do the same thing, I’m glad we have a variety from which to choose. I’d rather pick one that suits my needs best rather than have a single option that I hope does what I want.