SixApart annouced their changes to the pricing and licensing of Movable Type after the big fiasco last month from their original announcement.
The new pricing is not bad at all but I wonder if it’s too little too late. MT is a pretty nice piece of software for what it does but there are about 50 alternatives to it, many of them free, some may even have better features. MT was succeeding in terms of market penetration it seemed at least because it was great and free for private use. While I don’t find it wrong of SixApart to decide to start charging for it the disaster of their original 3.0 pricing scheme made pretty much every single MT user out there look at the alternatives. That single fact alone may make it already too late for SixApart to recover.
Why would I pay $99 when I can switch to WordPress for free for example. I suppose it’s a bit like Linux vs Mac/Windows. Linux is free but that’s not the whole story. Macs and Windows boxes have lots of feature that are still a little sketchy on Linux that give Macs and Windows value. But that doesn’t seem to really be true of Movable Type. Many of it’s competitors seem 100% just as good. Some even better.
The Gimp is a free image editing program but it doesn’t even come close to being as good as Photoshop and so I continue to pay for Photoshop. When and if the Gimp ever does get as good, stable and easy to use I will stop buying Photoshop. Movable Type’s competitors are already as good as Movable Type so there is little reason not to switch. I guess SixApart can only hope that through the revenue raised by their pricing scheme they can afford to pay for enough developers to stay ahead of the free competition.
I’m not so sure they can. Most web software is actually pretty easy to write. My own site probably took less than one month of total programmer time and if I was to re-write it it would probably take less than 1 week (and be written well the second time through :-p). This is in contrast to my real job, game development, where one title could take as much as 2 or 3 years and a team of 30 to 100 people. The point is, unless SixApart has some amazing new and expensive tech, any feature they add will be duplicated in days by the other free blog systems and so it seems like there really is no reason not to switch instead of paying.
I suppose you could pay for the support but I believe that’s how the pricing use to be in the first place. Personally I think they should have stuck with that. Free for non-commerical use but no support unless you pay. It may not have been profitable for them, I don’t know. But, once you start giving away something for free you can’t expect people to start paying for it IMO if there are already free and good alternatives.
something else I just noticed.
Movable Type is at a “.org” site not a “.com” site. Most web people know that “.org” sites are generally for non profit organizations, standards bodies, associations and things like that. I’m sure the guys at SixApart knew that when they signed up for their domain so it seems pretty clear that changing Movable Type from a mostly free thing into a commerical endeavor was not something they were originally thinking.
well.. free always sounds better, especially when the free stuff does more than the costly stuff.
I agree with your observations, but here is another point. They have a free version and many people may want to use that version. The key issue here is that, if many people just use one author then they will still have a user base to sell to, if to people who use the free version number of authors is very important, then MT may lose. People who use the free version is extremely important, because MT become well known mostly because it was free, not because it was extremely better than other software out there. I don’t see a big difference between WordPress and MT. To many people probably they will be the same. Currently, yes, the price doesn’t make sense, but if they can keep the free users here and later on improve their products so much that they are well ahead of the competitors then I do believe they have a future. However, currently I am very much doubtful about that.
Wordpress does not yet have multiple blog support. Nucleus CMS does, and there is even a Movable Type to Nucleus converstion tool built by someone called pilpi, but it is not so user friendly. B2evolution does have mulitiple blogs but I hear it is not exactly one click. Siteframe is not well known but pretty nifty, light and has excellent multiuser support. Serendipity is attractive, and wiki-fied but has only one blog. So for muli-bloggers Movable Type remains attractive. I bet there are a lot of people still using Movable type simply because they have multi-blogs. I am still with Movable type 2.63 and being content spammed for my sins.
What licence was Movable Type available under? I don’t think that it was the GPL other wise someone would have created a new open source branch.
I am impressed by your site and its software, and only one month of programming! Wow. You should release the software.
Tim
Tim, it sounds like you really looked through the options and from your info it sounds like MoveableType might still be ahead of the pack for lots of people. That’s good to hear for Six Apart
The only one I actually tried to install was WordPress. It installed as easy as Movable Type but then I looked at the code (since I would have to make modifications to use it for Tokyopia.com) and it was clearly version 1.0 meaning it was hacked together and will need to be what they call, refactored, before it’s not spagetti code. That scared me as a programmer but I’m sure for most people that just want to use it as is it’s not a problem. I suspect version 2 or 3 will probably cover that. Maybe about the time PHP5 is more common than PHP4.
The multiple blog issue is a problem. I also tried looking at Nucleus and I think Zope but both of them seem very hacker oriented for lack of a better way. It appears they require a ton of expertise to use effectively and setup where as MT and WordPress from the moment they are installed are ready to use, functional and pretty.
As for mine. It’s also hacked together starting with small features and adding as I go. It might only take me a week to clean it up (a week of fulltime work meaning since I have a real job and other things I have to do it would take several months to get through
) but, on top of that, giving it a pretty interface, documentation and making it easy to use is another probably 1 to 2 months of full time work.
Plus, it’s pretty heavy right now. I would need to convert it to PHP or at least some of it. I actually plan to start that at some point because I don’t want to get booted from another ISP and I suspect I could if I don’t do that.
I honestly wish I had the time and money to make a completely new system. My dream is it would be as easy or easier to use then Movable Type but it would also be more easily expandable and customizeable. For example being able to change the various fields and their usage or adding new fields. I guess MT 3.0 supports that through plugins but it would be nice if it could support it in the basic interface without plugins. Think of an online version of Filemaker or some other database program but with an easy to use interface that is aimed and blogging.
Also the fact that movable type is perl / cgi based has its issues too. It makes it a little harder for it to provide multiple versions of the same content, the cell phone version, the webtv version, the japanese version, etc. There are hacks or workarounds. For example you could get MovableType to spit out PHP versions of all your pages and have the PHP figure out what to actually display but that’s beyond what most users can handle. A different system could cover that.
Sadly I don’t have the time to do it.