Magento is Up for Sale
Magento is one of the most popular open source platforms ever, taking as much as 30% of the e-commerce market.
However, the future of Magento is increasingly cloudy. Magento is owned by eBay and forms part of their eBay Enterprise unit. After announcing the departure of PayPal, eBay is now looking to get rid of eBay Enterprises.
What will happen to Magento and who will control its future? No-one knows.
How did Magento
Although Magento is an open source, it has always been headed by a corporation. In early 2011 eBay purchased 49% of Magento Inc and shortly afterwards took full control.
Key staff started leaving in 2012 and the founder left in 2014.
Magento Go was the hosted version aimed at small businesses. Together with EBay’s ProStore platform, it’s due to close on February 1st with the loss of around 10,000 customers.
Magento 2 was announced in 2010 with an expected delivery date of late 2011. Now the planned date the end of2015. There are sites and Twitter accounts making fun of the constant delays. This is the best overview I could find of the current situation with Magento 2.
Even though Magento is officially open source and on Github, there were complaints that eBay has been forging it’s own path:
“the public Github is nothing more than a weekly sync-spot for the internal [eBay] repo”.
Now eBay is getting rid of Magento, together with its “eBay Enterprise” division. Karen Baker at WebShopApps says:
“the Magento side is only really making money around the PayPal revenue it generates, nothing more.”
If that’s true, there really is no longer any reason to keep Magento around, because PayPal will be owned by another company.
So What Comes Next?
The most likely outcome is another corporate buyer. Karen Baker says:
“I personally don’t see an IPO, I think a company like Accenture, IBM, Oracle even will step in here and make an offer.”
It’s a long shot, but if it’s hard to find a buyer, then eBay could consider handing the project back into the community, perhaps to a new non-profit foundation.
Magento sucks so much I will be very happy if it evaporates…
Magento could be bought back from its founders. It’s not the first time a similar thing has happened.
Hey Fotis. Bought back by it’s founders? I think one former Magento president suggested just that: [url=https://twitter.com/bobschwartz/status/558271419709018114]https://twitter.com/bobschw…[/url]
That would be the best ever band together!
Get ’em back. I just spent 45K on 3 yr EE contract and want to spend more.
Maybe we should do a Kickstarter to buy it back 😉
Let us know If you start a campaign 🙂
I think it should be buy back and it will be core interest of its founder because magento is a big platform and its not very simple to end it.As a developer i am also connected with one of the Magento Extension Development Company [url=http://www.fmeextensions.com/]http://www.fmeextensions.com/[/url]. So it will be good for us if its continue its operations
Totally agree, when a company starts getting chopped up it’s never a good sign. I’ve been a part of software companies like that and they just ended up a mess.
We are now through 3/4 of 2015. Any thoughts on how Magento is doing in its defining year. Are more customers moving to alternates such as Shopify and Demandware?
I think this is very helpful post for me..keep sharing.