The WordPress of Cellphones

This is quite a neat idea

Obviously I prefer the one made out of laser-cut wood – mainly because I’m made out of laser-cut wood myself, so I kindof understand it… but the idea that springs to mind that I find interesting about this is that there’s this common… thing….

The Napster of [insert thing to be napsterised]

The Napster of Banking
The Napster of Housing
The Napster of Violence
The Napster of etc etc etc… but napster wasn’t the only thing that turned an industry on its head. WordPress hasn’t done too badly either – a massive % of the world’s websites use it as a platform… and that’s what it is. It’s a plugin platform. A themeable plugin platform – and maybe that’s a better metaphor than napster. It’s certainly more resilient.

And the funny thing about wordpress is it isn’t actually terribly good. It was written by a 21 year old who made a lot of highly questionable nomenclature (and possibly architecture) decisions that remain as a legacy to this very day… but it still took over the world – quietly, without anyone ever taking it seriously.

All my sites run wordpress. This site runs on wordpress.

Anyway – If you want to create a disruptive tech, you need to undercut existing economics by several orders of magnitude – once you’ve done that, it really helps if developmental ecosystems spring up around it. This has already happened in a very very big way with software on phones… and a big % of the things on kickstarter are hardware adaptations, but none of the mainstream phones themselves were ever designed to be hardware plugin platforms, and that’s possibly an opportunity waiting to happen.