On the Expanding Footprint of Headless CMS…

The Lytics acquisition by Contentstack just reinforces a point I’ve made before: the large-scale headless/composable vendors are becoming the same full-featured DXPs they swore they were created to “solve.”

While there are smaller vendors that are still “true” headless (what does that even mean, really?), the upper end of that market is becoming indistinguishable from the older base of vendors. No judgment here, other than mild annoyance at the YEARS of shade they threw at “monolithic” vendors while they were essentially sneaking in the back door of DXP.

And maybe it calls into question the entire idea of “composable,” really. If things are supposed to be so composable, why do footprints keep expanding? You can swing the phrase “best of breed” around all you want, but we acquired a lot of “best of breed” companies at Optimizely too – that didn’t stop people from accusing us of being a “creeping monolith.”

I’m trying not to be grouchy here, I swear.