Did vBulletin's prior success cause forum software to stagnate?

Yeah, this is a bit of a rant and theory rather than anything I can prove, but would it be right to assume vB's early dominance caused forum software to generally stagnate and not move forward for many years?

Because as you also should know, competition is good. You do not want any one company to have a monopoly over a market, and to a degree vB originally did have that monopoly, every big forum of note a few years ago was running some version of their script.

And as a result, I'd say it caused Jelsoft to completely lose track of what was going on in the internet as a whole and not to pay attention to wider trends in website and program design. And they didn't really have to care to sell, IPB was still catching up to them at the time and other paid scripts had at best 10% of the market. Look at vB 3 in general, they were completely oblivious to how CSS based design had completely replaced table based design, and for years were too stubborn to change. The last features added were often just vanity features the developers wanted rather than what the software actually needed, and even the decent looking vB 4 prototype looked to be just a forum with a fancier style, they completely failed to see the rise in social networks and other types of communities and adapt accordingly.

Heck, if Internet Brands hadn't screwed everything up and forced the old staff to leave, we'd probably see them get quite surprised by the growing popularity of Facebook, Twitter, etc and the decrease of popularity for forums. I suspect Kier and the other devs didn't even consider the idea that forums might need to change to stay relevant, or might need more features than just a forum, or that social networking is important. I suspect their ideas were grounded in a 1990s mindset, one of forums being purely a hobbyist thing or the only such communication method to be popular online.

You could even say the buyout wasn't even the worst thing ever, it not only completely shook up vB, but also led to Kier and Mike coding XenForo and coming up with an interesting new forum script that wasn't content to just be like vBulletin. XenForo is probably a better script that vBulletin 4 Kier edition would have ever been, and provides some nice needed competition to stop the world of forum software stagnating, to stop it falling out of touch with the market like it did in the late 90s and early 00s.

And the bad thing about the lawsuit is that if XenForo lost, that'd basically leave IPB in the same situation as vBulletin were in, an uncontested niche where their competitors were miles behind. Do people really want them to be in a situation where they have no real competition to force them to improve?

Hell, maybe if vB had more competition back then forums might have grown more in popularity and various social networks and such sites might have 'lost' to them.

Is this an accurate picture of the vB 3 years and forum software?

Oh, and you know something interesting? I'd say The Admin Zone was once like vBulletin and did basically the same, nothing. That' what let to its downfall and decrease in popularity compared to sites like Admin Talk, Top Admin, Admin Forums, etc.

 

I want to point out that you shouldn't have included Taz because that sparks different conversation.

All of those sites you listed aren't very active.

 

Well it's technically relevant, because it highlights another problem with old school vB that I forgot to mention, that they were so sure of themselves as being 'market leaders' that they didn't bother to innovate much for quite a while. So when their competition caught up with them, they ended up losing ground to them off the bat. That effort spent on pointless things like project tools, vcards and other stuff? Could have been spent on actually relevant applications/addons like IPB has now.

And it's a direct parallel to the situation at TAZ, where they didn't bother to post new articles, contests or add many new features for quite a while (presumably because they thought they would never lose popularity) and ended up stumbling when new forums came along that did these things. Success leads to complacency, in both websites and software.

 

IPB's add-ons are slow in development due to having so many different things going on. They're not really trying to catch up with anything.

 

I understand where you are getting at, but you could have made a separate thread.