Your comment is wise. Perhaps you point to one way such services could be marketed: As vertical applications. So it's not "Your Generic Web site (TM)", but rather "Your Club's Online Home" (via CiviCRM) or "Your Online Store" (via Ubercart and integrated merchant-card services), "Your Photo Gallery" (via Lightbox2), and so on.
But we may differ in our estimates of the size of the market for preconfigured sites -- and the difference might be in that term, "generic". Having 100 themes available in the default installation would take a site far from "generic" in most peoples' minds. :) WordPress.com advertizes "over 60 attractive themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button". That's easy to match. Mix in some preconfigured module bundles and you're already well beyond "generic".
As always, "Making it easy is hard". IMHO Drupal's current cheerleaders -- most of whom are technology-minded -- overestimate how much people demand customization, and underestimate how little they want to fiddle with things. I saw this as an editor at MacWEEK Magazine when Apple leadership passed from Gil Amelio to Steve Jobs. As one wit put it, "Jobs took the difficult questions of buying a computer -- CPU speed, drive size, networking connections -- and replaced them all with, 'What color do you want?'." :) And the market went wild.
Your comment is wise. Perhaps you point to one way such services could be marketed: As vertical applications. So it's not "Your Generic Web site (TM)", but rather "Your Club's Online Home" (via CiviCRM) or "Your Online Store" (via Ubercart and integrated merchant-card services), "Your Photo Gallery" (via Lightbox2), and so on.
But we may differ in our estimates of the size of the market for preconfigured sites -- and the difference might be in that term, "generic". Having 100 themes available in the default installation would take a site far from "generic" in most peoples' minds. :) WordPress.com advertizes "over 60 attractive themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button". That's easy to match. Mix in some preconfigured module bundles and you're already well beyond "generic".
As always, "Making it easy is hard". IMHO Drupal's current cheerleaders -- most of whom are technology-minded -- overestimate how much people demand customization, and underestimate how little they want to fiddle with things. I saw this as an editor at MacWEEK Magazine when Apple leadership passed from Gil Amelio to Steve Jobs. As one wit put it, "Jobs took the difficult questions of buying a computer -- CPU speed, drive size, networking connections -- and replaced them all with, 'What color do you want?'." :) And the market went wild.