What is it that Drupal does so well?

We switch to Drupal years ago and continue to recommend it for one reason above all else. Drupal allows organizations to innovate faster and more efficiently than any other platform I have found (for most use cases). The web is constantly evolving, becoming more social and interactive. Highly successful websites create immersive web experiences that attract, engage and delight users.

We preach to our clients that websites need to be about the users. What users expect from a website is continually evolving - thanks Facebook, Amazon, Google, Pintrest, YouTube, etc. ;) If you are going to be successful you have to continually adapt and innovate in web time.

So the choice is that you can go with a simple CMS like WordPress, but eventually you will hit user requirements you can effectively implement. On the other end, you can choose an enterprise/commercial CMS, but you won’t get timely support for emerging web trends that users demand. Either way you end up with the inability to effectively meet all user requirements and deliver a state-of-the-art web experience.

Ultimately, Drupal enables us to best continually provide experiences that delight users and meet their ever evolving needs. Additionally having a huge do-ocracy based community future proofs the platform by enabling continued innovation around things we cannot even predict now.

In fact our biggest strength may not be what Drupal can do today, but what it will be doing tomorrow. While there is a lot of bike shedding, the community is remarkable in its ability to recognize trends, implement solutions then to iterate on those solutions to make them even better. I might even go so far to say the Drupal community may be the most effective example of self-organizing large scale innovation in the history of the world.

As a side note, I believe that we have to be very careful with an “enterprise” focus in our vision. Drupal being enterprise capable should certainly be a feature and highlighted in the marketing. But, there are plenty of other CMSs that do the enterprise better than us. What they cannot do is innovate as fast as we can.

With a few exceptions, innovation and enterprise are generally juxtaposed. Dollar per dollar, most enterprise are poor at driving true innovation – (Apple, GE, Google and a few other aside). Traditional enterprise technology is intrinsically slow moving and conservative in focus. (Maybe we could change that, but I wouldn’t bet on it)

As an ex enterprise Java/SmallTak developer, I would love to see Drupal become more OOP and follow more enterprise patters. However, over the last several years I have come to realize the brilliance of having a more accessible platform. Much of the real innovation that gets contributed back to the community is coming from startups, small organizations, and individuals scratching their own itch.

I think a continued focus on innovation around great engaging web experiences serves both the enterprise and Drupal’s existing base of smaller projects and keeps the community engaged.

Or soon will be - whatever the new innovation or function. I think TomDude makes excellent points about Drupal meeting emerging trends and clients' ever evolving needs. if you try hard enough you can find a solution or someone in the community working on a solution for just about everything you need.

Has anyone ever asked a (potential) client to explain what drupal is? The answers could give insight in the perception of drupal..

I would love to do a test where we would introduce somebody who doesn't know drupal, and let him research it. A simple thinking aloud protocol would give us a lot of info what somebody does to checkout drupal.

Fabien highlighted the selling points of symfony - http://fabien.potencier.org/article/65/why-symfony , we should have something similar for Drupal.