Drupal vs SquareSpace - What Drupal Longs to be?

So Leo Laporte (http://leoville.com/) has become a fanboy of sorts of Squarepace (http://www.squarespace.com/), they are one of his big sponsors now and many of his colleagues have jumped ship from platforms such as wordpress over to Squarespace.

So what is Squarespace? Basically it is a web-based content management website authoring platform that includes hosting; in short it's an easy way to make pretty and functional websites.

How much? Prices range from $8/month for a basic package, 1GB storage and 75 GB of bandwidth/month (if you are using this much bandwidth for you personal blog, good on ya, really) to $50/month for the "community package," 5 GB storage and 400 GB of bandwidth/month, plus some other customization features.

So I fiddled with Squarespace a little bit and there is NO DOUBT a learning curve to figuring out exactly how to customize your website BUT (and this is a big but) because the interface is fluid and makes customizing a breeze (column widths etc.) it is actually fun.

Also it is reported very easy to import from and export to other blogging platforms if you want to more to or away from Squarespace.

So is Squarespace what Acquia Drupal wants to be? In a word, yes. Squarespace bridges the usability chasm that developercentric Drupal dug for itself years ago (and weeks ago). Squarespace makes it easy and fun to experiment with designing a webpage without the overriding fear that you are going to cripple or destroy something.

Is Squarespace a threat to Drupal? Not really but sort of. The not really part come from the fact that being open source Drupal will always have the benefits that come from being open source the primary one being that it allows creative minds to take on the challenge of improving and creating new functionality without restriction.

The "sort of" comes from the fact that Squarespace will without doubt gobble up large swathes of the casual user market. That said, Squarespace is probably a bigger threat to Joomla than Drupal.

The other advantage I see is that by being an actual company and not an amorphous open source product, Squarespace can actually market itself and benefit from that marketing, whereas Drupal (whatever 'Drupal' is), even if it ran TV ads during the superbowl would end up with a lot of people going to the website and not having the foggiest idea of where to start.

Squarespace? Go to their website now and you can be pracice building your website in LITERALLY 15 seconds. No really, maybe even 10 if you can come up with a site name quickly.

I'll have to play around some more with Squarespace to really see how deep it goes but it definitely beats to a pulp and wipes the floor with Drupal on eliminating barriers to entry.