This reminds me of the first Browser War from 1995 to 2001. Microsoft, perennially behind the eight ball, figured out that the only way for them to assert greater dominance with an inferior product was to bundle IE 4 with Windows and make it the default browser. In just about a year it overtook Netscape Navigator / Communicator as the browser with the biggest market share and gradually ended up destroying Netscape altogether.

Replace Microsoft with WP, IE with Gutenberg and Netscape with page builders such as Elementor or Beaver, and you have an almost identical situation. In fact the original releases of Gutenberg were so unstable and underpowered, that the powers that be were emphatic in stating that Gutenberg was not a page builder.

It is amusing that now that Gutenberg has added some page-builder features, the same powers that be are throwing a hissy fit about another page builder advertising features and branding that it has used for a year.

The only difference that I see between the first Browser War and the ongoing Builder War is the ubiquity of Google (and its ad platform). It is this ubiquity that has helped millions of people reject Gutenberg by using Disable Gutenberg or Classic Editor, and switch to page builders that they like.

Elementor simply seems to have simply hijacked a common-use term that WP was trying to latch on to, similar to the marketing tactic used by Fry’s: “Your best buys are always at Fry’s”! For the uninitiated, Best Buy and Fry’s are both electronics superstores.

The higher ups at WP need to grow up and focus on making Gutenberg better, and they need to do it fast instead of carrying out hatchet jobs such as this against people who have been running circles around them for a feature that carries no trademark. There will probably come a time in the future when Elementor and other page builders will get eliminated, but that time is not definitely not coming in 2021.