Matt Mullenweg & Om Malik – LeWeb Paris 2012

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If you weren’t sure why I work at Automattic, here’s why. And if you weren’t sure why you should be using WordPress, here’s why too. Two birds, one stone thrown. :)

12 thoughts on “Matt Mullenweg & Om Malik – LeWeb Paris 2012”

  2. Interesting interview. However my recent bad experience of media uploading problems nearly pushed me away from wordpress and I have several friends and colleagues who feel the same so it goes to show just how fragile ‘customer loyalty’ is with the general public these days. It is all too easy to lose customers if software is rushed out. I’m a developer in an IT company too (e-commerce). Recently we’ve seen a huge expansion in the mobile apps development to the extent that our development department has doubled its ‘bums on seats’ in a single year and has now employed several specialist mobile apps developers. The company is now engaged in a ‘race against time’ to convert all existing applications into mobile friendly versions. I’m not convinced that this is all good. Our main customer base is not mobile and never will be so to me it seems silly to compromise the stability of our well established products and loyal customer base in the headlong rush to make everything into apps! I see troubled times ahead for my own company let alone any other that rushes into things and forgets about their existing customers. My company, rather like wordpress, has a near monopoly in its target market place and I think this tends to lead to an arrogance from the top where they think they can do anything they want and the poor old customers will just have to tow the line. I fear the customers at some point will bite back! ;-)

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    • Oh, but you can’t mistake Automattic (WordPress.com) and WordPress (open source project). What Matt says about mobile is for us, WordPress.com. The open source project has its own priorities and independent leadership team now, some of them working for us, some less so. So we also adapt and morph it the way our users prefer. if you look at the recent media uploader changes, we got this on WordPress.com from the fact we run the WordPress software, not by our own decision per se (though we were totally for it, and some of our staff worked on it). It’s actually much better the way it is now for the long term. Rushed? Maybe, but that is part of the open source mantra “release early, release often”, which has its merits and inconveniences. Any issues are quickly iterated upon and fixes comes in transparently to you (unless you hit the bug and see it no longer happening). Are you still having an issue with it, by the way?

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      • The new media uploader is working OK now but the problem for me is that I’m probably running a lower resolution than you guys would be as developers.

        Our home PC is a media centre and it is plumbed into a 42″ LCD TV hanging on a wall and to be usable when we are sat 6-8 feet away with a wireless mouse and keyboard we run a resolution of 1280 x 720 and we have large fonts enabled. The net effect of this is that the new media uploader requires lots more scrolling than the old one and the drop down box to select media file etc is hidden from view. The title and description boxes are now quite small (for us) and squashed onto the right hand side of the page and I have to expand them manually each time which is time consuming and tedious.

        The old media uploader was perfect for us as even at our resolution it was all visible and required very few mouse clicks or scolling to load photos. So it wasn’t bugs that were an issue to me but rather a fundamental design issue. I have spoken to many other users who like me run relatively low resolutions for similar reasons (TV screens or bad eyes).

        On the positive side, I like the fact I can see all the thumbs better in the media library and now I’ve worked out that I need to remember to always choose media file instead of the default attachment page I’m quite happy. I’ve also got the gallery working fine now too and I love that.

        The thing with the resolution is a pretty common issue. Even my own company has this problem as one of my co-workers recently wrote a new product and did all the design running on an apple monitor at something like 1900×1200’ish resolution. When it was first deployed live we had masses of complaints from people who simply could not use the product as links vanished or text on the page was so squashed up it was a mess etc. I’ve been developing so long now that I learnt that mistake years ago and now generally design my products to work nicely at say 1024×768 but we work in different fields, you guys are targetting joe public on a huge variety of devices whereas our customers are generally office based workers with desktop PC’s or laptops and our systems are business systems where frequent changes are not desirable as our customers don’t like having to re-train staff every few months. Also in our case we operate in e-commerce and our applications are used by Banks etc to process transactions, if we rush out something that has too many bugs we end up screwing up hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of end user invoices etc – not good! :-)

        BTW On a lighter note, I have shown that Koop video to a few colleagues and they all agree it is fantastic. Gorgeous Parisienne feel to it. We are now all going to buy the album – you need to claim some commission from them!! :-)

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