With the latest news coming out of Umbraco, it appears another CMS has fell.
Monterro acquires a majority stake in Umbraco
Of course, the typical "the future is bright" and "we'll never change" PR scripts have been rolled out. But the writing is now on the wall for Umbraco CMS.
Having worked in a private company that was majority-owned by an outside investor/hedge fund, I can say this can really only go one way. Things may start out great, but growth will come quick and hard, and blood will be extracted. This is what happens every time.
So there goes yet another open source CMS. And there goes another skill I can let fade off from my resume.
In the end, perhaps it doesn't matter.
My opinion for a while has been that the era of the CMS platform is basically over. Headless websites/CMS solutions are taking over, and I can tell you that developers would much rather be programming react js or vue js web applications than being known as a "WordPress developer." For everything else, there's SquareSpace and WebFlow.
I'll now share my prediction of what's to come for people making marketing sites/creative agencies.
Entire CMSes will be replaced by a custom bundle of NPM packages on the front-end, and nothing more than a document-database or key-value store on the back-end. Whoever manages to make a half-decent admin panel to wrap a document DB or KVS and make it "feel" like using a traditional CMS, will win.
Nearly all of these CMSes, especially the paid ones, can and probably will be replaced by something like a Lambda API and DynamoDB. It's stunning to think about how the sheer enormity of a piece of software like Umbraco could be distilled down to an admin panel and probably just a small Lambda API, and give you unlimited scale, at the same time.
This is something I have deeply meditated on and have even taken a bit of a stab at, but there are other gaps I see in the technology world that are more exciting to me at the moment.
Seeing this Umbraco announcement makes me think that the right time for some kind of solution like that is coming.