Does The Platform Matter?

This is a guest blog post written by David Peralty You can follow him on Twitter.

Recently, at Cross Media TO I was shown some great demonstrations of what companies are doing to bridge the gaps when it comes to the creation and distribution of ideas, and it got me wondering if at the end of the day the platform really matters?

I talk about and use WordPress nearly every day. At my job, I’ve become the go-to guy when it comes to WordPress, but if you look back at my comments over the last half dozen years, I’ve been just as vocal against WordPress as I have been in support of it. In the end, does it really matter though? I still use the WordPress.

There has been so much fighting about licenses, code changes, themes, plugins, development and community, but what isn’t talked about is that I doubt very many people change despite all of their complaints and bickering. We all want a system that allows us to publish content in an easy way with as little problems as possible.

While at the conference, platforms were very rarely mentioned. It was really focused more on the potential for distribution. How do we reformat an e-book to work on various devices? How do we help radio survive in our on-demand digital world? Can newspapers survive at all? It wasn’t about which software language things were programmed in, nor what hardware was being used. It was about finding or building the best tool for the job.

I am hopeful that so many people complain about WordPress, like I sometimes do, not because we want to cause trouble, or because we want to see the software change to meet our whims alone, but because we want it to continue to improve to the point where the software isn’t what gets attention, but instead, it is just a tool that works in creating and publishing our thoughts and ideas.

In the end, I think systems like WordPress have the biggest burdeon to bare as we expect them to deal with text, audio, pictures and video in a way that no other distribution system has ever had to do before.