WordPress Acquires Irish Startup Polldaddy

Like Intense Debate, Polldaddy doesn’t offer its technology to WordPress publishers alone – and it doesn’t plan to phase out its support for other platforms post-acquisition. But we can expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily towards improving WordPress – both the open source version offered at WordPress.org

How acquiring a closed source service and rolling it under the Automattic umbrella could at all improve the open source version is beyond me. What would it do to such popular poll plugins that already exist for WordPress, such as Lester Chan’s WP Poll?

What and how Automattic develop wordpress.com should be of no concern, however, as has been the case with gravatars, and certainly some of these other services they’ve acquired, it unfortunately is of concern with those who are worried about the long term development of WordPress.