Came here to post this. Although MT was a far more mature and better product, the licence shenanigans just drove everyone away. It was as though someone in MT just thought, "Hey guys, how can we alienate every non-paying user?" and ran with it.
Matt and co were very shrewd, had a 'good enough' product and got a few high profile bloggers to switch (and be vocal about it) and WordPress became the common blogger's tool. By the time 2.0 was released it became fairly ubiquitous for blogs, and people added stuff from there to make it a fuller CMS.
Re:How did WordPress win?
by jacques_chester on Thursday February 10, 2011 @06:01AM
(#2201521)
Essentially Wordpress was a triumph of marketing. There were other ostensibly just-as-functional systems around, but Wordpress had a nice looking site and moved fast to capitalise on the MT licensing fuckup.
Movabletype did their pay-only nonsense after version 2.66
People starting looking for alternatives.
WordPress 1.5 out and 2.0 was in beta and it seemed the strongest choice at the time. 2004 is like a lifetime for the internet, seems like a poor choice now but things were different then.