The "Wordpress era" has gone on a really long time.
That longevity makes it easy to forget how quickly these things can change; remember Movable Type was the king of the blogging systems for a good while, until THEY (if I recall correctly) did a gross moneygrab and WP filled the gap.
How quickly MT became a footnote should be something Matt keeps in mind.
Once you reach a certain size, inertia alone will allow you to survive for a very long time, even making bad mistakes. Digg died because it was still small enough that a mistake could kill it; Reddit is now so big that the exact same mistakes (or even worse ones) will just not stop it. Same for Twitter or Facebook. Wordpress is way past the size where it will take something more than an isolated legal case to cut it to size.
I disagree about Twitter, tho. It's not been doing very well lately; it's been in all the papers.
I know, but it has taken more than two years to take serious wounds and it's still very far from being dead.
As of now, it’s 80%.
Are you saying that your threshold for “serious” is more than a 71% loss of value?
These losses are squarely in the territory of those who are commonly labeled as “worst ceo’s of all time”.
Every shared host had PHP/MySQL, which made WP installs dead simple.