Disruptive Innovation

Mark Uraine is a Design Director at Automattic contributing full time to the open source project WordPress. The new Gutenberg block editor is on the cusp of completely disrupting WordPress. At WordCamp Santa Clarita Online 2020, he talked about how Phase 2 of Gutenberg started, how it’s evolved, and where it’s going. He examines the ways in which Gutenberg is going to change WordPress and how the ecosystem can prepare for what’s coming.

One of the hardest things to do in technology is disrupt yourself.

Matt Mullenweg in 2015

WordPress is continually under development. The Gutenberg project is a re-imagination of the way we manage content on the web. Its goal is to broaden access to web presence, which is a foundation of successful modern businesses. Phase 1 was the new block editor, which was released in WordPress 5.0. Throughout 2020 there is a focus on full site editing as we continue to progress through Phase 2.

It took visionaries to not be afraid of strategic paralysis, but to really take a chance and bet on something that could help disrupt WordPress.

Mark Uraine in 2020

While Phase 2 of Gutenberg is expected to continue at least through 2020, there are already plans for Phase 3 and 4 which you can read about in the show notes of this episode. It also includes a transcript of Mark’s WordCamp presentation.

The Four Phases of Gutenberg

  1. Easier Editing — Already available in WordPress, with ongoing improvements
  2. Customization — Full Site editing, Block Patterns, Block Directory, Block based themes
  3. Collaboration — A more intuitive way to co-author content
  4. Multi-lingual — Core implementation for Multi-lingual sites

If you want to try out the new Gutenberg editing experience and are not a WordPress user, just go to wordpress.org/gutenberg. If you want to get updates about the development of Gutenberg, you can go to make.wordpress.org/design. There’s also the Gutenberg Times podcast which Mark mentions in his presentation.

But now without further ado, enjoy this amazing presentation.

Links and Credits

Transcript

[00:00:23] Howdy, everyone. It’s so good to be here today. Thank you so much for attending WordCamp Santa Clarita online. I wish we could all be there in person together. But despite the circumstances, I think the WordCamp is doing a wonderful job at hosting this online for everyone and giving us an opportunity to be together. Today, I’m going to talk about disruptive innovation with Gutenberg and WordPress. As noted, my name is Mark Uraine, I am a Design Director, I’m a full time contributor to WordPress with my focus on Gutenberg. I really enjoy this topic. And basically that means in my role I do a lot of communication. So I communicate the strategic vision into tactical action items and communicate that to everyone else or to others who are interested or who need to partake in the project. I help to ensure that the project is moving forward. All within the boundaries of ethical communication. So that means we try to make sure that all decisions are public and include everybody on a global scale so that everyone has an opportunity to speak up, share their concerns and give us feedback in ways that maybe we haven’t thought through fully. It also means that our duty of care extends to everybody involved in the WordPress project and how we can make sure that any decisions that are made in Gutenberg and affecting WordPress are ultimately for the benefit of everybody partaking in the project and the software and the open source project altogether.

[00:02:18] So, a lot of that having to do a lot of that means I pay attention to a lot of Gutenberg feedback. So if you’ve been watching any of the feedback on Twitter or some other social networks, you’ll see back in 5.2, there was some very specific Gutenberg feedback. This is a thing that we see on releases when 5.3 came out we had some more Gutenberg feedback. However with 5.4, which just released in at the end of March, it took a turn a little bit and people found something else to complain about rather than Gutenberg kind of took a seat along the sidelines there.

[00:03:04] So what this means, though, is that when there’s a feeling of uncertainty or a little antagonistic feelings towards something that’s being changed in the software, a lot of times that has to do with something called disruptive innovation. And how that’s all happening in WordPress right now, which you can almost say disruptive innovation is kind of like a superpower, if you will. We can take this disruptive innovation and use it for evil or we can use it for good. And of course, being part of the WordPress community, we want to use it for good. And we want to do something that is really going to help the Web stay open. It’s going to help democratize publishing and provide the tools that people need to continue forward in their projects and on their Web sites.

[00:04:04] So disruptive innovation was a term kind of coined by Clayton Christensen a while back and on his website, he defines it and gives it a couple of attributes that I want to talk about that I think pertain directly to Gutenberg, one of which being that this new product or innovation may not appear as attractive as existing solutions. I think we can pretty much all agree that when Gutenberg was merged into core, there wasn’t a lot of happiness around that happening and it wasn’t the most attractive solution out there. It has since progressed a long ways and we’re in phase two right now. So it’s improved a lot. It’s being tightened up and the quality of Gutenberg has really shown through. And we’re seeing people who were initially in opposition to Gutenberg coming out lately and saying, wow, this is a great software and it’s changed so much and made their workflows so much easier. Another attribute that Clayton Christensen talks about disruptive innovation, he says that this innovation allows for a new population of consumers to come in. And I’ll get more into that a little bit later as we talk about how that’s happening.

[00:05:36] So to kind of solidify this concept of disruptive innovation, I have a few just a couple of slides about kind of how disruptive innovation has happened through history. Some things that we’re all familiar with, how personal computers have disrupted the mainframe computers, cellular phones have disrupted fixed line telephony, free online courses have disrupted four year colleges as being this gateway of knowledge or this gatekeeper of knowledge. Right, the online courses now allow knowledge to be spread so much more easily throughout the Internet. There are actual companies that have disrupted industries in our lifetime. We’ve seen Airbnb disrupt the hotel industry. Uber and Lyft are disrupting the taxi service. Amazon has disrupted the brick and mortar retail. And, of course, Netflix has disrupted video rental services. All these are companies that we were familiar with. We can identify their disruption in the industry and how that all is taking place throughout our life.

[00:06:53] I wanted to bring a point across about Uber, how Uber back in early 2019 incorporated a way to cannibalize their own business. As part of their master plan going forward. So initially they introduced the Uber X rides, which really kind of started disrupting their black car service. And now they’re looking at bikes, scooters, they’re doing food delivery, trucking and all of this, like last year, they bought Jump Bikes, so they’re making all these efforts to continually disrupt themselves. That’s really a visionary thing for a company not to get so comfortable in where it’s at, but to actively push itself into the future.

[00:07:50] And so that takes us to WordPress. How is WordPress disrupting itself? We’re all part of this community. How are we contributing to the disruption of WordPress?

[00:08:05] This is a graph of like the top million Web sites that are using WordPress. Top 100’000, top 10’000. And all these sites, looking at this growth, I would imagine one would think this is fantastic. WordPress is in a solid place right now in the industry. Our market share is great. Why would we want to disrupt this? Why would we want to make a decision that might cause these stats to take a hit, possibly?

[00:08:40] And that ultimately leads to this quote about the fear of making wrong choices, leads some companies to strategic paralysis. Companies tend to get so comfortable with where they are that they don’t make the disruption happen within their own business to push them into the future and thus they get disrupted by someone else that comes along. So how can we actively disrupt ourselves? It takes visionaries. And luckily for us, the project lead, co-founder of WordPress is a visionary. He’s been imagining a disruption for a while now, back in 2015. He was talking about how it is one of the most difficult things to do is to disrupt yourself in technology. And through that, he was pushing forward he was introducing and talking about Calypso, which was a redesign of the WordPress admin that WordPress.com uses. And so while some might look at that graph and say we’re in a solid place, I’m going to take a break and just let up and just ride this. The visionaries of WordPress are saying it’s time for disruption. And we saw this happen with Gutenberg.

[00:09:59] Gutenberg came along and it was an active effort to disrupt WordPress in a good way that could bring benefits to people. Help make WordPress better, more usable, and give everybody an opportunity to share their voice in the world.

[00:10:20] And so that brings me to the four principles of self disruption. Talking about this, we can break it down into some principles and kind of show how these principles applied to Gutenberg.

[00:10:34] So we have one, which is to target a need that can be met more effectively.

[00:10:41] Finding this need that people have WordPress is already solving a need. But if we were to disrupt it, are there other needs that need to be addressed at this time that we can meet in an effective way, identifying our disruptive strengths? So what are the skills that we have as the people behind WordPress? That can be work together in such a way that we can really push forward that disruption or push forward a product that is better and more accessible?

[00:11:17] Number three is to kind of step back or sideways from in order to grow. And this is where we’re all kind of on this path. We see these incremental changes happening. This release cycle of three releases a year. And and little by little, we’re just kind of trucking away, improving WordPress and making the changes needed to keep it going. But can we take a step out of that routine and envision something completely different, something that will, as mentioned, disrupt it? So this has been done. There was a sidestep and a vision to disrupt it with Gutenberg, a block based editor.

[00:11:58] Number four is once we make that choice, let that strategy kind of emerge and take shape. We can’t plan this whole thing out. This is this is innovation that’s happening. So we can’t, like, have everything defined beautifully on a roadmap for everyone. It’s kind of a cycle as we go and improve and get feedback from everybody in the community, we can implement this feedback and keep iterating and moving forward.

[00:12:29] So talking about number one, that need that needs to be met more effectively.

[00:12:36] We saw there was a need for a more versatile content management system. This was evident in the amount of other CMSs that were gaining popularity. We saw a growth in page builders happening in the ecosystem and closed platforms that were rising. So taking a look at all this common trend that was happening throughout the years, how can we position WordPress in a place to meet those needs and excel even further, especially in ways to keep the Web open using open source software? Another need that was very obvious, especially for new users and anybody who’s helping new users build a Web site. Is this need to unify the interfaces within WordPress? Back then, we had the editor. You had the customizer, WP admin, widgets and even plugins have their own interfaces. And so for a new user to jump in and start building a Web site, they struggled often. I had an opportunity to partake with Rebrand Cities on a couple events where their goal is to really bring small businesses online, bring their business to have a Web presence. And so we’d sit down with business owners and that’s where I got to talk with Joe at WordCamp Santa Clarita a little bit as well. And you help these small businesses build a Web site and they get in there, they get into WordPress and they don’t realize the difference between customizer and the editor and the WP admin or the amount of plugin interfaces that they need to go through to get their site doing what it needs to do. And so that’s a definite need that needed to be addressed.

[00:14:40] Number two, the identifying of our disruptive strengths. JavaScript was fully adopted by this time. It was sweeping the Internet. Libraries were being built on top of it, and it had established itself as a solid coding language that was capable of amazing things. This was an obvious path to go to really incorporate and utilize JavaScript more in the software than what we were currently doing. And like I mentioned before, there was the Calypso project on WordPress.com. There was a lot of learning gain from that. Calypso was using APIs and redesigned the WP admin in a way that helped the user identify things a little easier, unified the interfaces. So we’re learning from some of this stuff. It was done in the open on GitHub.

[00:15:37] Number three is stepping back or sideways in order to grow. This really can be a challenge, but Calypso is kind of like that fresh look at WP admin. And so knowing that there was an API, how can we take advantage of the API using JavaScript and build a better experience in the software? And, of course, Git and Github, where I believe a big factor in Gutenberg’s success. It allowed more contributors to really get involved in ways that wasn’t easily done in SVN or Trac.

[00:16:19] And so number four is letting that strategy emerge, as I mentioned. And if anybody’s familiar with reading through some of the documentation about Gutenberg, you’ll notice that in the vision section there’s some basic principles that kind of are tactics that kind of supported the overall strategy of Gutenberg. These things were everything in WordPress becomes a block. All blocks are equal. Drag and drop is a secondary option. Place holders in blocks are key to help identify what the user needs to do to make that block functional. Direct manipulation is intuitive. So we wanted the user to be able to interact with that block, whether it’s layout or content right in the page and not necessarily have to go elsewhere in WP admin and code editing shouldn’t be necessary for customization. That’s a big one. We wanted to give people that ability to have a versatile content management system and be able to customize this and make it their own without having to do a lot of code, or any, if possible.

[00:17:35] So phase one of Gutenberg came out. It was to create a new block based editor and it was merged into core. Once that was accomplished, we identified three other phases. And we’re currently in phase two, pushing Gutenberg beyond the editor. And this has recently evolved into what we’re calling full site editing, basically. So all of last year was spent, we were tightening up the interface. We were improving the blocks, improving the design and the experience for users who come into Gutenberg. And now we’re extending that to become a full site editor so that you’re not only just editing your content, but you can edit your templates, you can edit your patterns, your Web site. You can build it within Gutenberg itself. As this phase will come to a close, hopefully by the end of this year, we’ll kind of have something merged into core.

[00:18:34] Phase three will become a focus. And that’s about collaboration and multiuser editing. So if you can envision like Google Docs, where multiple users can edit the content together, leave comments. This is kind of that phase three of what can be done in WordPress.

[00:18:52] And then finally, phase four is about official multilingual site support. Which is a huge benefit for the globe, for all countries, all languages to really get involved in that. And so despite all the mojo, the bad mojo, right, like there’s been a lot we can see that just looking at Gutenberg’s reviews in the plug in directory. Despite that, why do we love WordPress? There was a study done in early 2019, a site building study. It was led by Sarah C. Mark and Sarah James. And the number one answer to this question was extensibility, the ability to extend WordPress in such a way that it works for the particular users. And with that in WordPress, we saw why that was the number one answer. We have the CLI, the API, we have plugins and themes, short codes, custom post types, widgets. There’s just a variety of ways to really extend WordPress.

[00:20:04] And now with Gutenberg, we have blocks. And his blocks are becoming more popular and the typical way to interact, they’re taking over widgets. They’re removing the need for short codes. We’ve blocked templates as people build templates within Gutenberg in the full site editing experience. And these, in conjunction with custom post types, really enable a beautiful experience.

[00:20:36] Global styles are a thing that’s being talked about right now, and they are so close to merging in at least the iteration 1 of global styles. These in conjunction with themes, are going to give that customization ability to users without having to code. So these include things like line height, font families and scalability, colors, all this stuff. And we have block patterns, which, if anyone’s following Gutenberg 7.9 was released this last Wednesday. And it introduced block patterns, but now in the inserter. So there’s a unified way to add either blocks or patterns of blocks to your page now from one single interface.

[00:21:31] And ultimately, when we see all this stuff together, we notice that WordPresses extensibility is refreshed. It’s getting a little bit of an overhaul, I guess, or a revamping of how WordPress can be extended. It’s meeting that need or that desire of people that want that ability to extend WordPress and customize it the way that they want. So all that in conjunction with the modern JS libraries, like React, Git and Github, just really opens up a beautiful opportunity for people. And a beautiful way to innovate within WordPress. So I wanted to bring this back to Gutenberg, right? Like we talked about disruptive innovation and what that’s about. How does Gutenberg fit in with that? So with Gutenberg, we’ve redefined editing and layout using blocks. And this is attracting more site builders today.

[00:22:42] In fact, when Gutenberg was merged into core, that year saw five percent market share growth in WordPress alone. And that was the largest growth in market share year over year, that WordPress has seen. With Gutenberg, we’ve introduced modern code and this is attracting new developers. WordPress 5.4 just released at the end of March and it included a 153 Gutenberg contributors. Not all of them were developers, but a good chunk of them were and a lot of them are learning how to develop with React, how to use these new libraries right there in the software.

[00:23:30] And with Gutenberg, we have provided an easier, more adoptable version control and repo system. This is attracting more contributors overall. And WordPress 5.4 included, 519 contributors. 32 percent of those, a third of those contributors were first time contributors. Now, these numbers don’t all relate to Gutenberg, but they’re significant. That’s a large number of people diving into this software, into this project, especially first time contributors. And so essentially, we’ve attracted more site builders, new developers, more contributors, and all of this is just really benefiting the ecosystem right now. It’s seeing a breath of new air coming in and starting to thrive and starting to pick up. And I believe it’s going to grow. It’s really going to just get better as the software improves, as full site editing becomes a thing. I can’t wait to really see the outcome of this. And it took visionaries to not be afraid of strategic paralysis, but to really take a chance and bet on something that could help disrupt WordPress.

[00:24:56] So this isn’t a breakthrough innovation to say, it’s a disruptive innovation and it’s making WordPress more affordable and accessible. How is it affordable? What do you mean affordable? WordPress is free. Right. I mean, affordable, that people will afford to spend their time contributing to something like this, especially those who desire to learn the new coding languages that are out there. Those people who want to learn React. They can do it in WordPress now. They can do it as part of our community.

[00:25:32] And when I say accessible, there have been leaps and bounds of improvements for accessibility in Gutenberg alone. It has become one of the most accessible editors out there, if not the most accessible. It’s fantastic. And features are always being implemented to help, whether it’s keyboard navigation or various other accessibility like device assistive technologies. It’s really beneficial for those. And on top of that, when I say accessible, too, I mean people can get involved with Gutenberg through GitHub. Right, without having to struggle through the Trac and SVN and that whole system. So all of this is happening based on something called disruptive innovation.

[00:26:25] I’m encouraging you all to come and join us and to be a part of this, because it’s changing WordPress right now and it’s creating a new refreshed ecosystem out there. People are designing and building blocks and block patterns. And innovation is creeping back into WordPress tenfold right now, because of the possibilities. So please come and partake with us, give us your feedback. Join us in the decision process, which is all public to really drive forward WordPress into the future. And with that, I want to say thank you so much, everyone, for attending the talk and and joining us all today at WordCamp Santa Clarita online. And if there’s any questions, I’m happy to answer anything or get back to anything.

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