WordCamp Europe is in the books, with the usual strong lineup of quality talks from excellent speakers. I (David) was unable to attend physically, but I watched both days of talks on the livestream. Since there were far too many talks to discuss here, I’ll make some personal notes on Om Malik’s interview of Matt Mullenweg on Saturday afternoon. (For those who don’t know who Om is, he founded Gigaom and is now a partner at True Ventures, one of Automattic‘s primary investors.)
- Matt spent a bit of time on stage to showcase current development on the Gutenberg Editor plugin with video footage of it operating on desktop and mobile environments. He also repeated some points he made in a blog post published on his site before the interview. He encouraged the crowd to install Gutenberg and test it out. There are over 500 installs now and several user reviews.
- On competition there was nothing new, however Matt did bring up Gutenberg in the conversation: “Gutenberg Editor isn’t catching up to Wix and others; we are leapfrogging them. We’re skating to where the puck is going.”
- Om asked what WordPress will be like in ten years, especially with gestures and voice interfaces growing in popularity. Matt’s answer was: “I think text will still be primarily the way we consume information ten years from now, even with gestures and voice UI around.”
- According to Matt, Automattic didn’t just want the WooCommerce code base when it acquired them: “We wanted their code but also the 52 employees and the Woo community as well.”
The interview has already been posted on WordPress TV, and many of the other talks are there now too.
