Technology
Matt Mullenweg Calls WP Engine ‘Cancer for WordPress’ and Urges Community to Switch Providers
CEO of Automattic and Co-Founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg this week unleashed a devastating attack on a rival company, calling it WP engine “WordPress cancer.”
Mullenweg criticized the corporate — which has been commercializing the WordPress open source project since 2010 — for making profits without giving much in return, in addition to disabling key features that make WordPress such a robust platform in the primary place.
For context, WordPress has the facility over 40% network, and while any person or company is free to use the open-source project and run an internet site themselves, various firms have sprung up that sell hosting services and technical expertise based on it. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg founded in 2005 to monetize a project he created two years earlier; and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14 years of operation, the vast majority of which got here from a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.
This week I shall be speaking at WordCamp USA 2024WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg didn’t mince his words in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking the stage, Mullenweg read get out of the post has just published on his personal blog, where he points out a separate “five for the long run“investment commitments made by Automattic and WP EngineWith former co-creator 3900 hours per week and the last one spending just 40 hours.
While he admitted that these numbers are only “approximate” and will not be entirely accurate, Mullenweg said the disparity in contributions is critical, as each Automattic and WP Engine “are about the same size, with revenues of around half a billion (dollars).”
Mullenweg has criticized a minimum of one other outstanding hosting provider up to now, accusing GoDaddy of making the most of an open-source project without giving anything meaningful in return — or more precisely, he called GoDaddy is “parasitic company“and “an existential threat to the future of WordPress.”
In his latest offensive, Mullenweg didn’t stop at WP Engine, but prolonged his criticism to the corporate’s major investor.
“The company (WP Engine) is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm $102 billion in assets under management,” Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn’t care about your open source ideals, they just want a return on their capital. So at this point, I’m asking everyone in the WordPress community to vote with their wallets. Who are you giving your money to — someone who will feed the ecosystem, or someone who will extract every bit of value from it until it withers?”
In response to query asked by audience member Later, when asked to make clear whether Mullenweg was urging WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said that he hopes every WP Engine customer watches his presentation and that when it comes time to renew their contract, they need to consider their next steps.
“There are other hosts who’re really hungry — Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Pressableetc., that will love to have that business,” Mullenweg said. “You can get faster performance even by going to someone else, and migrating has never been easier. That’s part of the idea of liberating data. It’s like a day’s work to change your site to something else, and I highly encourage you to think about that when it comes time to renew your contract if you’re a current WP Engine customer.”
“WordPress Cancer”
In response to the uproar over the speech, Mullenweg published continuation of the blog postwhere he calls WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress. “It’s important to remember that if left untreated, the cancer will spread,” he wrote. “WP Engine sets a bad standard that others may find appropriate to replicate.”
Mullenweg said WP Engine is making the most of the confusion that exists between the WordPress project and the business services company WP Engine.
“It needs to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote. “My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they are giving you WordPress, but they are not. And they are profiting off of that confusion.”
Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is actively selling an inferior product since the core WordPress project stores every change made to allow users to revert their content to a previous version — something that WP Engine doesn’t allow, according to his support page.
While customers can request to enable revisions, support only covers three revisions, that are routinely deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends customers use an “external editing system” in the event that they need extensive revision management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is straightforward: saving money.
“They turn off commits because it costs them more money to keep a history of changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that money protecting your content,” Mullenweg says. “That goes to the heart of what WordPress does, and it destroys it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to recover your content, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is to manage and protect your content.”
TechCrunch has reached out to WP Engine for comment. We’ll update here after we hear back.
Technology
The company is currently developing washing machines for humans
Forget about cold baths. Washing machines for people may soon be a brand new solution.
According to at least one Japanese the oldest newspapersOsaka-based shower head maker Science has developed a cockpit-shaped device that fills with water when a bather sits on a seat in the center and measures an individual’s heart rate and other biological data using sensors to make sure the temperature is good. “It also projects images onto the inside of the transparent cover to make the person feel refreshed,” the power says.
The device, dubbed “Mirai Ningen Sentakuki” (the human washing machine of the longer term), may never go on sale. Indeed, for now the company’s plans are limited to the Osaka trade fair in April, where as much as eight people will have the option to experience a 15-minute “wash and dry” every day after first booking.
Apparently a version for home use is within the works.
Technology
Zepto raises another $350 million amid retail upheaval in India
Zepto has secured $350 million in latest financing, its third round of financing in six months, because the Indian high-speed trading startup strengthens its position against competitors ahead of a planned public offering next yr.
Indian family offices, high-net-worth individuals and asset manager Motilal Oswal invested in the round, maintaining Zepto’s $5 billion valuation. Motilal co-founder Raamdeo Agrawal, family offices Mankind Pharma, RP-Sanjiv Goenka, Cello, Haldiram’s, Sekhsaria and Kalyan, in addition to stars Amitabh Bachchan and Sachin Tendulkar are amongst those backing the brand new enterprise, which is India’s largest fully national primary round.
The funding push comes as Zepto rushes so as to add Indian investors to its capitalization table, with foreign ownership now exceeding two-thirds. TechCrunch first reported on the brand new round’s deliberations last month. The Mumbai-based startup has raised over $1.35 billion since June.
Fast commerce sales – delivering groceries and other items to customers’ doors in 10 minutes – will exceed $6 billion this yr in India. Morgan Stanley predicts that this market shall be value $42 billion by 2030, accounting for 18.4% of total e-commerce and a pair of.5% of retail sales. These strong growth prospects have forced established players including Flipkart, Myntra and Nykaa to cut back delivery times as they lose touch with specialized delivery apps.
While high-speed commerce has not taken off in many of the world, the model seems to work particularly well in India, where unorganized retail stores are ever-present.
High-speed trading platforms are creating “parallel trading for consumers seeking convenience” in India, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note this month.
Zepto and its rivals – Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy-owned Instamart and Tata-owned BigBasket – currently operate on lower margins than traditional retail, and Morgan Stanley expects market leaders to realize contribution margins of 7-8% and adjusted EBITDA margins to greater than 5% by 2030. (Zepto currently spends about 35 million dollars monthly).
An investor presentation reviewed by TechCrunch shows that Zepto, which handles greater than 7 million total orders every day in greater than 17 cities, is heading in the right direction to realize annual sales of $2 billion. It anticipates 150% growth over the following 12 months, CEO Aadit Palicha told investors in August. The startup plans to go public in India next yr.
However, the rapid growth of high-speed trading has had a devastating impact on the mom-and-pop stores that dot hundreds of Indian cities, towns and villages.
According to the All India Federation of Consumer Products Distributors, about 200,000 local stores closed last yr, with 90,000 in major cities where high-speed trading is more prevalent.
The federation has warned that without regulatory intervention, more local shops shall be vulnerable to closure as fast trading platforms prioritize growth over sustainable practices.
Zepto said it has created job opportunities for tons of of hundreds of gig employees. “From day one, our vision has been to play a small role in nation building, create millions of jobs and offer better services to Indian consumers,” Palicha said in an announcement.
Regulatory challenges arise. Unless an e-commerce company is a majority shareholder of an Indian company or person, current regulations prevent it from operating on a listing model. Fast trading corporations don’t currently follow these rules.
Technology
Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform
Wizardone of the talked about names within the cybersecurity world, is making a major acquisition to expand its reach of cloud security products, especially amongst developers. This is buying Dazzlespecialist in solving security problems and risk management. Sources say the deal is valued at $450 million, which incorporates money and stock.
This is a leap within the startup’s latest round of funding. In July, we reported that Dazz had raised $50 million at a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.
Remediation and posture management – two areas of focus for Dazz – are key services within the cybersecurity market that Wiz hasn’t sorted in addition to it wanted.
“Dazz is a leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, which fits perfectly into the company culture,” Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz, said in an interview.
Remediation, which refers to helping you understand and resolve vulnerabilities, shapes how an enterprise actually handles the various vulnerability alerts it could receive from the network. Posture management is a more preventive product: it allows a company to higher understand the scale, shape and performance of its network from a perspective, allowing it to construct higher security services around it.
Dazz will proceed to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has made a reputation for itself as a “one-stop shop,” and Rappaport said the integrated offering will proceed to be a core a part of it.
He believes this contrasts with what number of other SaaS corporations are built. In the safety industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups where companies prioritize revenue over building a single technology stack that actually works as a platform.” It could be assumed that integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.
Wiz and Dazz already had an in depth relationship before this deal. Merat Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP of R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.
After Rappaport left to found Wiz together with his former Adallom co-founders, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP of Product Yinon Costica and VP of R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one in all the primary investors. Similarly, when Bahat founded Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in it.
The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she or he was the second family of Mickey, Rappaport’s beloved dog, referred to as Chief Dog Officer Wiz (together with LinkedIn profile). Once the deal was done, the 2 faced two very sad events: each Bahat and Mika’s mother died.
“We hope for a new chapter of positivity,” Bahat said. The cycle of life does indeed proceed.
Rumors of this takeover began to appear earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that they then began talking seriously.
But that is not the one M&A conversation Wiz has gotten involved in. Earlier this 12 months, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a major cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been the biggest in Google’s history, partly because Rappaport believed Wiz could turn into a fair larger company by itself terms. And that is what this agreement goals to do.
This acquisition is a test for Wiz, which earlier this 12 months filled its coffers with $1 billion solely for M&A purposes (it has raised almost $2 billion in total, and we hear the subsequent round will close in just a few weeks). . Other offers included purchasing Gem security for $350 million, but Dazz is its largest acquisition ever.
More mergers and acquisitions could also be coming. “We believe next year will be an acquisition year for us,” Rappaport said.
In an interview with TC, Luttwak said that one in all Wiz’s priorities now’s to create more tools for developers that have in mind what they need to do their jobs.
Enterprises have made significant investments in cloud services to speed up operations and make their IT more agile, but this shift has include a significantly modified security profile for these organizations: network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to to hack into these systems. Artificial intelligence makes all of this far more difficult when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s also a chance: the brand new generation of tools for our defense relies on artificial intelligence.)
Wiz’s unique selling point is its all-in-one approach. Drawing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk aspects and provides its users with a series of detailed views to understand where these threats occur, offering over a dozen products covering the areas, corresponding to code security, container environment security, and provide chain security, in addition to quite a few partner integrations for those working with other vendors (or to enable features that Wiz doesn’t offer directly).
Indeed, Wiz offered some extent of repair to help prioritize and fix problems, but as Luttwak said, the Dazz product is solely higher.
“We now have a platform that actually provides a 360-degree view of risk across infrastructure and applications,” he said. “Dazz is a leader in attack surface management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the entire stack and build the most incredible context that allows you to trace the situation back to engineers to help with remediation.”
For Dazz’s part, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing strong solutions and this week said the third quarter was “amazing.”
“But market dynamics are what trigger these types of transactions,” she said. She confirmed that Dazz had also received takeover offers from other corporations. “If you think about the customers and joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it on one platform.”
And a few of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz, an authority in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a rise of $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion (which confirms our information). But what’s going to he do with this money? Make acquisitions, after all.
Wiz says it currently has annual recurring revenue of $500 million (it has a goal of $1 billion ARR next 12 months) and has greater than 45% of its Fortune 100 customers. Dazz said ARR is within the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and currently growing 500% on a customer base of roughly 100 organizations.
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