I don't deny that WordPress has a lot going for it, but Automattic's reported $45 million in annual revenue doesn't put it too far ahead of Squarespace.

WordPress's annual revenue is 400% Squarespace's last reported revenue.

Squarespace's last reported revenue was 2010. WordPress's $45 million is projected this year - a two year discrepancy.

Your title is misleading because "Wordpress" as a general brand encompasses the open source Wordpress.org CMS workhorse, which most of us on HN typically associate with the name. Wordpress.com the cloud blog platform has lots of valid competition, notably Tumblr and Blogger.

I enjoy learning the bootstrapped rags to riches story about Squarespace, but your title frames the story as if its about a new competitor to Wordpress the open source CMS, and it is not.

Point taken.

...except on price and on the broad software ecosphere Auttomatic/WP has (which for the self-hosted option pretty much crushes everyone else unless you are doing a full corporate CMS, where Drupal and Joomla might come into play).

It's a nice proprietary option (maybe even and exceptional one) but the article byline is still very linkbait.

I apologize in advance but I get pretty annoyed at the linkbait accusation. It's a strong, somewhat provocative headline yes, but how is it linkbait? Yes, Squarespace is not currently a competitive alternative to the self-hosting option of Wordpress (which I use everyday), but as you admit it's still an exceptional proprietary option for smaller scale websites. These and a million other nuances don't fit in headlines.

"Provacative" = a pretty good euphemism for "linkbait". "Aggressive SEO" is another.

I am unapologetically from a view where that kind of PT Barnum grade nonsense didn't square well with real journalism. I still cringe at it.

In blogging there's little editorial oversight, thankfully. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to write anything. Here's how the article came about since you seem to view journalism as some kind of conspiracy: The Touchfire people reached out to me, sent me the Touchfire for review, and I reviewed it. Simple as that. I'm not bashing Apple fans since I clearly am an Apple fan in that I make known that the Touchfire is unworthy of a "beautiful" device - i.e the iPad. (Yes, I had fun with the lede though.) As for some kind of Kickstarter bias, I wrote a very positive review about the Zboard which was a Kickstarter project. I'm all for informed pushback from readers, but that's an awful lot of unfounded speculation.