I just finished and loved Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and this paragraph made me think of EE.
What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial. For any given piece of software, the question, “Do the people who like it take care of each other?” turns out to be a better predictor of success than “What’s the business model?”
He refers to the open source movement, but it seems to me that EllisLab has found a sweet spot with a business model that dedicates resources to a level of support that helps the people who care about it take care of each other.