Okay, so I’m sticking my neck out here, I don’t blog as much as I would like (2 young children & running WebShopApps.com kind of stops a lot of things), and although I rant verbally I try not to write it down too often. But I’m sort of hoping I can get across what I believe people are worried about around Magento, X.Commerce, Go platform and all the current change going on.
It’s easy to rant about Magento. Buggy code, no support, no roadmap, don’t care about developers…But ultimately for quite a number of us in the e-commerce space Magento has given us a new lease of life, we may have formed a whole new company on the back of dipping the toe in the water back in 2008, and now even be a major player in the space. We may be a freelancer hacking away at home earning a very good living from that one magento extension we sell for $20. Or we may be a blogger providing information for ‘free’ and in return earning an income from consultancy. Magento has given many of us opportunities, and before we rant we must acknowledge that and thank them.
The concerns? Well the lastest news about X.Commerce does re-iterate the feeling that our destiny is not controlled by us. Magento is fluid, it’s changing, new owners, regular new releases, Magento Go, Saas, Ebay, XCommerce, X.com. How do we manage to keep up with this?
What will Magento be in 1 year from now? I’m not sure anyone knows the true answer to that question, not even Yoav, Roy or the guys at XCommerce. For those of us whose foundation is Magento this obviously brings questions and concern:
- How should we invest?
- Do we send our staff to magento university to get trained in Magento 1.x or will those skills be out of date in 6 months?
- Do we invest in extension development for a platform that may shrink in the future?
- How do we get our extensions on Magento Go – can we even get our extensions on there when the only interface seems to be Javascript and a REST API?
- Do we spend $$$s on developing xyz and hope we can integrate?
- Or do we just roll over and say ‘hey that was a good time but now I’m ready to move onto something more secure?
My feeling is that Magento haven’t really laid down their identity. The ideal which I believe most people want is for Magento to be a framework for e-commerce. Which doesn’t have major change happening every month. We want there to be clear guidelines on what Magento will develop in terms of functionality and what they will leave alone. We don’t want them one day to be developing a framework, the next to be developing an extension. We don’t want to see them acting as e-commerce solution providers, that’s what their Enterprise Partners do. We want to know what ‘open source’ really means for Magento.
If Magento don’t set these clear boundaries on what they are I believe it creates an extremely flaky foundation for the community, and as such results in less investment in Magento, people become wary and look at other business opportunities.
Magento’s perspective on this? I’m guessing that they would say they are just building in ‘core’ functionality that is either needed to make the platform gain traction (e.g. Payment Gateways on Magento Go), or because there is so much demand that missing these out would cause issues. Or, Magento Go just isnt ready for developers yet. My answer to this is, like test-driven development, you should be doing community-driven development, don’t develop code then worry about how the community can feed in after.
I recently posted on inchoo’s blog that we had to embrace, support the changes and move forwards. I still say that, we have no option but to do this if we want to grow and have a prosperous future. No matter how we look at it we are all on the Magento train. You either get off at the next stop, or you hold on and try ensure you are keeping up.
In my little ideal world this is what I would like to see:
- Magento become a true framework for ecommerce that supports web designers & developers
- Re-assure us by giving us access to technical docs on how the Magento Go platform will support design & development
- Stop ‘bulking’ magento with new functionality that can/has been developed by 3rd party developers
- Spend effort on making the framework support multiple extension installations without risk of conflict (make it more like how iPhone Apps work)
- Setup a working group that consists of members of the community and magento staff, so that communications are improved and we have channels of people we can approach as ‘magento’ outsiders
Magento keep saying that they support Open Source, I think what people really want to see is proof of that in the new Magento Go/X.Commerce space. Then maybe we will be re-assured.
And for WebShopapps? Well, we will be staying on the train (we are needed for the parcel post!), hope they don’t push us off after this blog 😉
Interested in people’s views on this, either leave a comment or contact me via webshopapps.com. Please treat me carefully, I mean well, honest.
Karen, I think these questions concern every company that has Magento in its core.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be possible to get a clear picture of where Magento will be in one year time, but disclosing some general rules about what they will develop into core product and what will be left to the third party developers would be nice.
Nice piece Karen, thanks for airing the issue.
While I’m not a programmer and don’t understand all of the more technical aspects of what you raise, I do understand the nature of your concerns, and I share them from the perspective of an end user.
Will people like me find ourselves with a swag of unusable extensions once Magento and X-Commerce ‘marry’?
I personally dislike Ebay and what it represents (cheap and nasty ‘stores’, appalling design… the ‘$2 shop’ of the web), and I’m concerned that so much of the 100’s of hours invested in my store will end being useless.
Magento does need to be clear and upfront with it’s plans, otherwise my confidence in the platform will rapidly dwindle.
Thank you for this great summary. I believe many developers, designers and companies are in a similar spot.
Personally I’m staying on the train as well, because so far Magento has proven to be good and I’m willing to trust Magento they will continue be that way.
Would love to get to know you in person at one of the next conferences somewhere.
Thanks, V.
Karen – certainly valid observations and concerns. Magento has built up this incredible ecosystem that has enabled many companies like us to succeed by partnering with such an incredibly valuable tool. What we’re seeing right now is this major announcement has introduced more uncertainty than there was before. While Magento was ever-evolving, we at least had some idea of the direction. With X.Commerce – there’s not many in this ecosystem that knows what that is. Right now, all that seems to be out there is a bunch of ideologies about open commerce, but the technology, the practicality, and how that actually affects us is still rather undefined.
Personally, I’m not worried, but can understand where others may be. Our goal as an eCommerce solutions provider, is to combine a best of breed service on a best of breed software. If that is Magento, great. If after a year of this it no longer is – then we’ll continue to find the best solutions for our clients. But certainly we’ve all made significant investments into Magento, and until the dust settles on this acquisition there is going to be concern in the back of everyone’s minds.
I’ve been through a few acquisitions in my time and I’ll promise you one thing – there will be change. Not right away, and it will be good for some and probably bad for others, but it will take time. Keeping the leadership on board is typical for an acquisition like this, and they’ll have incentives to make sure the positive momentum keeps up. But in most acquisitions, that leadership moves on within 1-2 years and that’s when the changes start happening.
Just observations from my experience but I’ll stress that regardless of what changes might be around the corner, nothing gets around the fact that Magento is a best of breed product and that’s not going to change anytime soon. We’re confident in recommending this product to our clients who we look to partner with for years and are not slowing down our investment into our service offering on the platform. (Go Go Magento Go, right?)
Karen,
Nice post.
Unfortunately, Magento developers and companies that make a living out of the Magento ecosystem should concerned about this. In our case, we have already lost a portion of our business (Sage Pay) because Magento decided to create their own extension for GO, a extension that is not usable yet (it lacks of 3DS checks, pretty basic stuff). And it was not a technical decision, it was a 100% business decision, Magento wanted a portion of the cake (payment gateway commissions) and went after it.
Don’t get me wrong, they own the business, they can do that, it’s fine, but we feel bad about that, because we expected at least to be able to compete, as we did with our extensions for Magento CE/EE, which surpass our competitors (including Magento) in terms of user base by thousands of downloads. So, how can we, developers, not be concerned when Magento decided to create extensions for a closed platform and no allowing developers to compete in that market?
We’ve been asking for access to the GO platform since it was launched back in February in LA, by that time we pictured an exceptional opportunity to grow our business, but nothing went as expected. IMO, the greatest thing about Magento CE/EE is its openness, the ability to extend pretty much every single bit of it, developers are able to create solid businesses around it, monetize their knowledge and invest on growing the businesses by either hiring more developers, training them or even paying Magento huge partnership fees. All this good stuff is not happening with GO, key players, developers with years of experience in the platform have not been taken into account when creating the GO platform, in our case, we even personally asked to be part since day 1.
We truly hope that this approach changes and that GO platform becomes an open platform, allowing developers (and not only designers) to be part of it, we give Magento the benefit of the doubt, we disagree with the way things are handled now, but we are confident that our voices will be heard. As I said, we have already lost business, but the sooner we can jump in and compete the best for the Go platform, we are not afraid of competition, we are afraid of not being able to part of the GO ecosystem.
Cheers,
Ignacio.
Nice post! But remember that the community already got worried when eBay first invested in Magento – but since then the platform only attracted more users, interest, and publicity. And despite the new Magento offerings in various directions (first the paid Magento Enterprise edition, then the Professional edition, and more recently MagentoGo) the part of the community only grew – whether you stick to Magento CE, or offer services based on the EE and now MagentoGo. There’s room for everyone ;).
We’ve been with Magento since the very beginning back in 2008. And when the paid editions came out, I made a decision to only support the CE – at least for a while. We grew our business around the CE and the market grew so steadily that we didn’t feel threatened at all by the other Magento offerings. Today we’re as successful as ever and the buzz around Magento and eBay is actually helping to bring more users on board with Magento. I see it in our sales!
I think this is going to continue at least for the next 6 months to a year. The Magento market and user base will grow, and there will be enough for everyone – including Xcommerce!
No one can tell what will happen beyond 6 mths or 1 year. But remember that where there’s risk there’s also potential.
I share the same concerns and I fear that we really will not know what is going on until the deai closes and the end of the year. I too am in the process of growing my business around Magento. I hope Magento continues to communicate with us on the plans so that we can feel we know what is going on. I feel that eBay/XCommerce will embrace the Saas solution and leave the Magento CE, EE platform and extensions to the Magento team to continue as they have. That is my hope anyway! As Vinai said, Magento has been good to me and plan to stay on the train!
The first job I landed out of college was at a small creative agency in Rochester, NY called ImageSmith. I made $9/hour. That was big money. (At my next job I jumped up to $15/hour and wondered how I’d spend it all)
ImageSmith had a long history in Rochester. They created slide presentations for executives at Kodak, Xerox, and Bauch + Lomb. An entire company, with about 12 full time staff members, whose only job was to do what Powerpoint and Keynote rendered obsolete.
If your business is so dependent on one particular company doing things one particular way and you can’t recover from it, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby that, through a fluke of the market, is temporarily profitable.
If you’re in client services, you job isn’t building Magento sites. Your job is helping your clients solve business problems. There’s still a whole host of business problems that Magento CE/Pro/Enterprise solve, and solve well. Magento U remains a solid investment. Magento 2 is a refactoring of Magento 1.x. Unless the market fundamentally shifts to the point where people no longer host their carts, these platforms have a solid history. Even if they vanished, I suspect a fork of the last released codebase would find a home in a community driven project.
If you’re in the business of selling Magento extensions — you’re not really. You’re in the business of selling software in the online retail vertical. If you want to grow your business you need to diversify out of the Magento CE/Pro/Enterprise market, as well as other software markets. Magento Go is a good place to start, but it’s only one of hundreds of software markets.
One last thing to consider. If a Magento rep got up at a podium, and you listed your worst fears for the platform, and they said you were 100% correct, how would you react? Why would you react that way? Most importantly, what really would have changed in the universe between the time you asked your questions and got your answers?
That’s my take. I’m looking forward to Magento 2, looking forward to pealing back the onion layers that still exist in Magento 1, and keeping an eye on eBay, X.Commerce, and the rest of the market.
Interesting post Karen, and comments from varied community perspectives are insightful. I think the uncertainty around the future of Magento is mitigated by the open source nature of the CE version. No matter what happens, there will continue to be a community version of Magento, it may not always have the latest and greatest code from the other Magento versions, but it will always have innovation through extensions. If there was enough desire/need within the community, it could be it’s own separate open source project.
Just as easily as Magento themselves are building community functionality into the core, the community can (and does) build core functionality into extensions; Sweet Tooth’s rewards system, Varnish-based full page caching are two such examples that come to mind.
On the Magento Go question, I think it will have to be fundamentally different to the extension architecture the CE/EE self hosted stores have. I’ve been lucky enough to get beta access to the Go Platform and although it gives plenty of chances to extend Magento, it will never be as open and extensible as an installed version – if for no other reason than security, who’s willing to run untrusted code on shared platform servers?
As a result I’m sure there will continue to be a market for those wanting to install and run their own store, the same thing we see with wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
We’re all here because we recognize there’s something in this selling things on the internet game, and that’s not changing anytime soon.
Same story as always: If you want to control your destiny, control your code.
Selling Magento modules you run the risk of them including your functionality in the core code base (like Twitter did with some 3rd party apps). Like Alan said, I’d diversify.
I wholeheartedly agree. I try to keep my rants within our office, but try to “balance” any comments in the public arena.
I knocked up an article literally as Magento Go was announced (much to Varien’s dismay), http://www.sonassi.com/blogs/magento-go-saas-announced/
It pretty much hits the nail on the head, and what you have written above just mirrors our own concerns. We’re a web development agency born purely out of Magento. We eat, sleep and breathe Magento – from web development to purpose built hosting solutions; the last thing I would ever want is for it to be snatched from us as easily as it was granted.
eBizmarts are just the first of many developers to suffer the fallout of Magento Go/PaaS – but they won’t be the last. If I were to be blunt, I would see this move as a turn from a community driven solution – which has helped debug, promote and build Magento to be what it is today; to an in-house monopolised hosted solution.
The truth is, we all need to look at our business models to figure out exactly how to benefit from centralisation. I know, for ourselves, we have the good fortune to have a solid hosting infrastructure, an unparalleled knowledge of complex Magento hosting and development – which *might* pave the way for us to deploy PaaS hosted solutions.
Wish us all luck, we’ll need it.
Interesting blog post and comments.
We are Magento Partners in Australia, and we sell a module too (yeah, just the one!), and I remember an internal discussion we had when we first wrote it regarding whether or not the effort was going to be worth the expense, given Magento themselves could quite easily add similar functionality down the track.
We also own an online retail business, and have sold online for over 10 years. We know of many sellers who have been accepted as merchants onto the Amazon platform for example, only to later have Amazon begin selling their product ranges, rendering them nearly obsolete on the platform. Hope this doesn’t happen with Magento and module developers…
I guess we have some similar concerns regarding Magento and their direction with X.Commerce. Particularly as we somewhat specialise in Magento / eBay integrations. We use some of our own code (and a lot of expertise and experience with the eBay platform) in doing this. So perhaps X.Commerce (Magento Go) might offer native integration with eBay down the track. At the end of the day, as long as Magento continues to support a community, by way of the Magento CE platform, and Partners by way of PE and EE, I don’t think we will have too much to worry about. I don’t like hearing about the Sage Pay incident. Perhaps Magento should draw a line in the sand on module developers have a clearer idea of where the platform service will end (will they end up including gateways from every major region? or just some?), and where module developers can pick up the pieces by offering extra functionality.
Personally I can see the CE/PE(going to disappear?)/EE versions continuing as they are for some time yet, with most of the change occurring with Magento Go, and th cloud arena of services that can be bundled in.
I believe a Chinese proverb says, ‘May we live in interesting times’.
1
I’m sure that Magento platform & Ecosystem will continue to grow.
Magento invest in Magento 2 which will have a lot of great improvements.
Magento becoming more powerful: Zend, all these Enterprise customers like Nokia or Ford. And now eBay. This is GREAT!
2
“Magento Go platform developers will get ability to build, host and deploy custom Apps for Magento Go.”
I believe that Magento Go Add-ons is not the Apps, Apps support will be added in the future.
And quite possible that Apps will work with CE, Pro, EE and Go platform, it will be new extensions format.
We really live in interesting times!
Karen,
I’m the GM of X.Commerce. I really enjoyed reading your post even though I found it a little painful! 🙂
I am very concerned about the community and making sure that the opportunity in front of us is an opportunity for developers such as yourself.
I would be very happy to discuss the issues you have written about and see if we can’t bring more clarity. Please contact me at matthew@x.com if you’re interested in chatting about the future. I agree that seeing into the future is a hard thing even for us, but I do know that intention is an important thing and our intention is to create something that helps merchants to grow and creates a phenomenal business for the developers along the way. I’m definitely an “open source” kind of guy and I know that X.commerce will be a company with that in its DNA. No promises of getting it right all of the time, but definitely a promise to try out best and to listen to folks like you.
Thanks!,
Matthew
Having come from X-Cart (not to be confused with X.Commerce 🙂 ) both supporting clients and developing my own “modules” and “templates” that end users could buy out of box. I soon realized, as Alan mentioned all of my eggs were in one basket. So I decided to poke around to see what other options were available. In comes Magento beta over my eyes and I realize how many problems X-Cart as well as most other PHP based E-commerce packages had at the time. Long story short, I waited until Magento was mature enough to try out with a few clients, there was some struggles but in the end, I completely got out of dealing with X-Cart clients, sold my little “mod” shop (Cart-Lab) and started focusing my attention solely on Magento.
I think the fear is that cross road that everyone is approaching, suddenly all of this time, money and energy is invested in this product has now all of sudden become under new ownership and it scares most. Like everything else, most people don’t really like change. I know I don’t, but at the same time I’ve learned to embrace it and try and make the best of it. On the other hand however I can’t say I haven’t started looking around to see what other solutions may have been brewing in someones basement. If not like Alan also mentioned I’d suspect a few forks to show of Community, just like OS Commerce had with Loaded.
It is nice to see authority figures from Magento and Ebay as well as the community stepping up to help ease everyone’s change induced panic fear. I think everyone perked up from the coffee coma’s when out of the blue the announcement was made. Only time will tell how it all pans out for Magento, Ebay and the community. Now, wheres my popcorn?
More of my own thoughts and views on X.commerce and Version 2:
http://www.molotovbliss.com/magento-x-dot-commerce-version-2-0-and-ebay
A lot more views and input on inchoo’s article as well:
http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/breaking-news-ebay-acquires-magento/
I’d like to thank Karen and everyone who has commented on the original post. This is one of the more thoughtful and insightful discussions I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks and I greatly appreciate your interest in the future of Magento.
I’d like to add what I can to the discussion, touching upon a few of the major themes and concerns that have been raised here
Let me start by discussing the impact that our pending acquisition by eBay will have on our business and the Magento ecosystem. First and foremost, the acquisition ensures that Magento will have greater resources with which to grow. As much as we’ve accomplished over the past few years, we have so much more that we want to do. The only thing holding us back has been the limits of working with our own capital and resources. Becoming part of eBay helps ensure that we can keep growing at an even faster pace in the years ahead.
eBay has made it clear both in private conversations and in public statements that they will actively support the ongoing growth of Magento. They value our vibrant community and understand the importance of continuing to support and enhance our Community Edition. They value the customer relationships (and revenues) generated by our Professional and Enterprise Editions. They are excited about the rapid growth of Magento Go, and the ongoing development of the Magento Go Platform and Magento 2. We have a business that is growing quickly and is profitable; it makes complete sense that eBay would choose to support our continued growth.
At the same time, we will be working with X.commerce team to create something even bigger: a global commerce operating system that will serve the needs of a full range of merchants.X.commerce won’t replace Magento; instead, it will combine the power of Magento with eBay’s other assets in ways that work best for retailers. Third-party developers are a central part of this vision, so I think there’s lots for you to be excited about when it comes to Magento’s future with eBay.
Next, let’s talk about the issue of Magento “competing” with extension developers.
We recognize that some developers may have been hurt by our introduction of a payment gateway in Magento Go. And it’s never a good thing to have a member of our ecosystem hurt by one of our actions. But for better and for worse, there are risks that go along with creating extensions for an open platform.
We work hard at creating an environment in which the risk/benefit ratio is compelling enough to attract great developers and offer them compelling opportunities. Part of sustaining and growing this ecosystem involves making difficult choices about how we manage the platform, what features we introduce, and the timing of our announcements.
We try to act in the best interest of merchants and the ecosystem at large. When making any major decision, we ask ourselves if it’s the right thing to do for our customers, partners and developers. Of course what’s good for most of the ecosystem might not be good for an individual developer. But we have worked hard – and will continue to work hard – to ensure that we provide growth and opportunity for as many of you as possible. Because your combined talents are what makes the Magento ecosystem different from any other eCommerce solution.
I recognize that our rapid evolution into multiple products has produced some frustration. Life might be simpler for many of you (and for us) if we focused on a single product offering and didn’t continue evolving into new areas. But predictability and narrow focus is not in our DNA. From its inception, Magento has been driven a relentless desire to revolutionize and democratize eCommerce. That drive and desire is what made our phenomenal growth possible. We can’t stop innovating and pursuing new solutions, even if these innovations disrupt what we’ve built to date. We believe this is the only way to keep our ecosystem vital, relevant and growing for all of us.
As for our commitment to open source, and the Community Edition, I’ll say it again: there is no Magento without the Community Edition. This open, free product is an amazing laboratory for innovation and trial. It provides a low-risk point of entry into our platform. Developers love the Community Edition, and eBay is eager to build on our relationships with the developer community. So our commitment to CE will continue, stronger than ever.
We recognize that some of our products – Magento Go in particular – are not yet open in the way that many of you would like. I understand your frustration and ask for your patience. It will take time and great care to bring developers into this offering in a responsible way.
From the moment we announced Magento Go at our Imagine eCommerce Conference in February, we have made it clear that we want and need to tap into the developer community to fully realize the potential of Magento Go. The Magento Go Platform is our first step in the process of creating a vibrant Platform as a Service. The goal is to provide developers and merchants with the same flexibility that they experience with our deployed products. Keep in mind that MagentoGo is brand new; it will take us time to fully realize the PaaS piece of the equation.
I hope I’ve helped to address some of your questions and concerns. Thank you again for investing your energy in Magento. I’m incredibly excited about the future, and all of us at Magento will continue working hard to create even greater opportunities for you.
Roy Rubin
Co-founder and CEO
Magento
Having read Karen’s post and comments here and on Inchoo, my personal thoughts are that the issue clearly is about community trust and the commercial aspect of the eBay deal.
Traditionally, we are skeptical about large companies acquiring companies that have established a trust relationship with their user community. I guess this is what B00mer and others describe as “change” which almost nobody likes. So, we managed thus far to have a certain trust towards Magento to keep doing what they’re doing and supporting their community in established ways. However, the parameters have now changed and we are expected to shift our trust towards eBay and continue with our positive expectation that eBay, just like Magento, will continue supporting the community.
Reading what Matthew Mengerink said above and other statements concerning the purchase released by Magento and eBay, we are positively assured that it is in eBay’s best interests to keep and stimulate the community around Magento. Well, that’s certainly nice and exactly what I would do too. No need to create chaos.
So, to get back to the issue of trust, I personally, think that people will be apprehensive when large corporates take over ownership of something and while Magento was never truly Open Source in the sense of, say WordPress or similar OS projects, we trusted that Magento knew that they would not be where they are without a reasonably happy community. The question poses itself, “are we going to be able to have the same level of trust towards eBay”?
We are reassured that we shouldn’t worry! Ok, that’s all fine in words, statements, videos, etc. It is easy to say things. But what we really want is to see the reassuring statements in ACTION. In other words, as people say, we will have to see how it all plays out with the actual actions that will take place around the community support, openness of information, sharing of upcoming plans etc. I’d like to believe that structures like eBay know this and will continue to support community involvement.
In my mind, Magento didn’t become successful only due to the love of the community but the significant drive for everyone involved to make a living and, of course, sizable profit. This is a powerful driver in the current world and it ain’t gonna change soon. My guess is that eBay recognizes this and will keep this paradigm intact.
So, my conclusion could be summed up with the good ol’ WWII poster:
“KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON”
First of all, you do not need an MBA to know that you don’t have to put all your eggs in a single basket, it’s common sense these days, everything changes, change is part of our lives and we have to learn to live with that fact. The issue here is not about going bankruptcy because not being abe to sell an extension for future Magento versions. I’m pretty sure that most of us have other genuine income sources than just one (or two) successful Magento extensions.
IMO, this is about knowing the game rules in order to take decisions, guessing is always part of the decision process but if we know the rules and how to move across the board, the decisions we’ll take will be a bit more certain and the chances to succeed will be slightly higher. After reading B00MER’s and specially Roy’s comments it’s clear (for me at least) that big changes should not be expected for Magento CE/EE in the short/mid term, and, that the GO platform is going to be pretty closed to developers like us trying to create core business extensions like payment gateway integrations. The latter was not that clear from me yet, I thought that GO was going to offer some kind of plugin development framework or even an “App store”, with a validation process to ensure quality, I had those impressions before the Magento Imagine conference, and I left LA with that impression as well after GO was announced, but it seems like I got it wrong.
We still hope for a change of mind of Magento decision takers regarding the GO platform, it would be good to incorporate the knowledge of experienced Magento developers into the platform. I’m pretty sure that Magento has a rocking team of developers and engineers, capable of doing great things, but I believe that the demand of specialized extensions is higher than what the “official” development team can address, there’s a strong community of developers waiting to jump in to bring their magic to the GO platform.
Ignacio.
Well, it seems like I got Roy wrong and that Magento GO WILL BE OPEN, now it’d be good to know WHEN 🙂
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royrubin05: @ebizmarts it seems you misunderstood my comments, to be clear the Magento Go Platform will be OPEN to all as we continue to move progress
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/royrubin05/statuses/83167681053855745
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ebizmarts: @royrubin05 OPEN to core business extensions like Payment Gateways as well? #Magento #MagentoGO
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/ebizmarts/statuses/83168064249663488
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royrubin05: @ebizmarts no specific timeframe yet, lots of technical work ahead of us.
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/royrubin05/statuses/83178367955894272
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royrubin05: @ebizmarts yes, absolutely. That’s the plan.
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/royrubin05/statuses/83171767383883776
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ebizmarts: @royrubin05 thanks for the clarification, I’ll update my comment on WebShopApps blog. BTW, do you have a time frame for this?
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/ebizmarts/statuses/83172106824728576
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Thanks for the post. From my perspective, betting on Magento now is too risky. The eBay business model is far from the one of an open sour software vendor, and its track record in dev community management & open source is just scary.
Time to find alternatives to Magento for my customers. Drupal Commerce? Young but given Drupal momentum…
For me it’s a sad news… Magento was unique, awesome standalone product. What will be in a future…? Who knows…
Interesting article from Karen, with even more interesting comments from leading developers, Magento community followers and even Roy himself… Am I any the wiser… well… perhaps not. Not Entirely.
After using the CE version of Magento for the last 3 years (where did that go?), for our own sites here in the UK, which bring with it the fun, tears and laughter (and tears again and again). We are getting close to a crossroads with what do to next version or software wise. The jump from 1.3.x to 1.4.x while I do not doubt is needed, has eluded us at present with one particular site. in question. With a handful of modules in place, including the Shipping Rates modules from Karen are essentials to the cause and running of our site. We have not been able to make the jump to 1.4.x. (let alone 1.5 or 1.6) because of the work involved it carrying over modules and the databases. This will take time, weeks possibly months to get it right and for us to get back up to speed, with new templates etc…
So, the Go platform looks very, very tempting. Could it fully import our old store, sure I’m sure it could. But it does have a whole list of missing features though, needless to say features that the community developers are quite clearly sat on the fence waiting to jump in with. To have the hosting and maintenace taken away would be a blessing… Hello the cloud. But we need those modules to come across too.
So from a developer and end users perspective, Magento please, pretty please (with sugar on top) pull your finger out and open the doors to the community developers asap for Go, if you want it to ‘Go’ far, so to speak. You have the support and dollar from Ebay, so security excuses a plenty, let us see the product finished and open for all…
tick tock…. time and tide waits for no man.
Many thanks – Paul