Wordpress began as a blogging platform. Best for single-person and small company sites. Can now manage a multi-user network of many sites.
Five-minute installation (but see Hagen's talk) and easy upgrade. Also one-click plugin upgrading
Wordpress spinoffs - microblogging, bbPress, BuddyPress, Gravatar. WP not intended for large scalable websites (although it can do it) but it has more flexible uses.
"Wordpress community involvement? in Drupal sometimes hard to understand how features get into final release. Same?"
A bit! Lots of routes into core code. .org is plugins, themes, docs etc; .com is the SAAS and makes money for Matt Mulenweg's company
What can D learn from W?
Hard to say. Don't know D. But maybe: avoid bloat. We moved import tools back out of core because it was only going to be used once, and would otherwise be bloat.
"Good to have company driving it?"
It's still Mullenweg and he cares about open source. Recent discussions with a non-OS'ed theme developer led to the developer agreeing to OS his code.
When Wordpress does one-click, it gets one-click right. Really right. Drupal site upgrades are a decent experience but not straightforward.
Avoiding bloat is basically about hard decisions. One person's bloat is another's killer feature.
Wordpress' main strength is its ease of use, but that restricts what it can be used for. Drupal can learn a lot from it, but should never try to just be "Wordpress Plus"
