The del.icio.us text size being fairly delimited, I didn’t have quite the space I needed to flesh out the “Biggest Community Wins” argument alluded to in my link. The comment, in fact, was merely a reference to an earlier post here describing our own move from Movable Type to WordPress.

In short, though, there’s not much I disagree with above. Size is not the only metric for success (particularly for niche or non-platform technologies), it’s dependent on a variety of other factors as noted, and it’s not everything.

That said, I think if one looks at the history of the software industry, it indicates that community size is the single most accurate gauge for success. Think Windows, Linux, or the phenomenon known as WordPress. Communities are built and sustained through different paths or different means, but in the end size does matter. A lot.

It may not guarantee longevity, and it certainly doesn’t indicate technical excellence, but it does encourage adoption. Which in the end, as VHS taught us, is probably what really matters.