So first of all, Wordpress.com/.org is the premier blogging destination, powering some stupid number of all websites in the world. Medium is the premier platform in the Silicon Valley Techno-Bubble.

I'm not saying what they've done is easy by any means, I'm saying that what they've done is not innovative and should be considered so just because they have a lot of users. Clearly a lot of users does not solely make a business successful, as evidenced by their layoff of 1/3 of the company today.

Also, innovation is doing something in a new way, whether by customers or product. And nothing they are doing is by any definition new.

You're reaching here with the Wordpress example (.org isn't even applicable to this discussion -- it's an open-source CMS). Wordpress.com is a hosting platform. Just because as a subset of the options you can make a blog (vs. an ecommerce site, a portfolio, a landing page, etc.) doesn't make it Medium's competitor.

Visit their homepage. Do you see a content aggregator or something closer to Squarespace?

Wordpress is 100% a competitor to Medium. Probably their biggest competitor.

Even if you want to restrict to .com, WordPress.com (VIP) competes for many of the same users which Medium has been competing for.

I think Medium can strongly credit its success to Google.

Google built blogger to the point where it killed every other blogging platform, and then once they became enamored with social and Google Plus they let it languish to the point where it had almost become unusable.

Medium's genius was recognizing this empty market that Google had conquered but abandoned, and created what blogger would have been had it continued to be updated for the world of gifs and emojis.

And then failed to get acquired :-). Only half joking here.

I think your analysis is spot on, Google did a great job of consolidating the world into a place you could pull off a single RSS feed and get lots of good content, and then pissed it away. And I think Medium has done an excellent job of stepping into that space.

What I find interesting is that Google hasn't done the follow on which is figure out that this team understood the blogging space well and could be a part of a "print" side of Google (much like Youtube is the "video" side of Google). Of course there is that whole Tumblr thing which did poorly under Yahoo!'s care.

Sometimes I think it is like playing Milton Bradley's "Battleship" where each effort helps map out a part of the space where there is, and is not, a possible product present.

> Google built blogger to the point where it killed every other blogging platform...

No they didn't. Wordpress powers some absurd number of all websites (25%-ish). Tumblr is still fairly popular. And Medium of course. What google did do is effectively kill off RSS readers, but that's a different story.

>No they didn't.

I'm with this guy. Blogger if anything, brutally assassinated LiveJournal. Unless you're in Russia.

"President Obama didn't post on Blogger. He posted on Medium."

Is that really "doing something in a new way"? Or is it "doing the same thing in a new place?"

You could say the same about Obama posting on Tumblr: http://barackobama.tumblr.com - except he hasn't done so in three years.

Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

> Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

You say that as though it's easy to do these things...

No, I'm not saying it's easy, just that doing something very well isn't particularly innovative.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking down Medium's product - it's fantastic. But the OP claimed that Medium has "unambiguously, objectively succeeded" in being innovative, and I just don't see it. I'd actually argue that Tumblr was far more innovative - there are some fascinating forms of content that came out of that place, not to mention the whole social network, reblogging effect, etc. etc.

But neither has shaped up to be a particularly successful business, and placing perceived innovation above that might not be wise when you're talking about user generated content. What happens if either of them fails?

Yeah but it's not that hard either if you have the resources. Now we see, though, that the cost of doing it has so far exceeded the return.

Easy? It's beyond easy. It's trivial.

> Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

That's... not an easy thing to do. Making anything to do with technology "easy" is no small feat; that Medium was able to do this with as big an incumbent player as WordPress (for example) is an even bigger feat.

>That's... not an easy thing to do.

Offering something easy to post that's looking good across devices?

Gimme a break, they have a single basic template, and minimal authoring tools. With these constraints, there are literally tens of thousands of Wordpress, Ghost and vanilla HTML templates by various developers/designers with 1/1000 the resources of Medium that look just as good across devices.

Well they did that by basically limiting what the user can do. The editing options were extremely limited. There was also no customisation until recently. They built a basic-function responsive blog platform. How is that hard?

It's very hard to tell people to use your software that has 1/100th of features of the incumbents but it's done better. Apple did it with iPhone for instance, but normally startups die trying.

That's because the iPhone didn't have 1/100 the features of competitors -- it had 80/100 of the features, but focused on the 80% that mattered (no "fm radio" or "mobile flash" for example).

Imho that was mostly achieved by marketing , not technical innovation (which they claim)

Also helps a lot with the amount of connections Ev Williams and co have. I would guess that having all the right connections was a huge part of Medium's success, especially really early on. With enough connections you can grow (almost) any half-decent service.

hard != innovative, was OP's point.

OTOH, solving well-established hard problems sometime requires more true innovation than developing new ideas. I prefer to do both.