Making the switch

I’m thinking of switching from Movable Type. Why? Well, a couple reasons, purely personal.

  1. I like to try new things, and I’d like to extend this to blogging software and see what else is out there.
  2. The Ben-Mena-SFO-MT-cutesy-hipness annoys me, maybe simply because I’m not a part of it, but it annoys me nevertheless. I’m contrary like that. It reminds me of having to like the popular kids in school.
  3. MT 3.0’s new fee structure is too high. I think it represents San Francisco prices for a non-San Francisco world. Add to this the fact that MT is popular and successful because it was free and because people were encouraged by its cost and accessibility to use it. MT is a great product. Do I like it enough to want to shell out 70$-100$ for it? No. They do have a free personal version, but their terms limit how it is used, even for individuals, and who knows how long even this accomodation will last. I am not a fan of limits put in place simply to pad their bottom line. Should people pay for MT at all? Well, it is arguable. You should certainly support MT if you want to and appreciate it, however should you extend that same sense of appreciation to wanting to help build their company?

    I think they should have adopted a different strategy: build out Typepad‘s services and subscriptions slowly while developing an enterprise level edition of MT that is different from the core popular product. This is not the case now. Keep MT free for sites without advertising revenue. Commercial sites should encouraged to upgrade to the enterprise level product which could natively support ad banners, etc. It seems like they wanted to start making some money right away and were willing to lose users in the process. That is a bad way to do business. Instead of restricting current features of MT to encourage upgrading to a paid license, restrict only newer features and newer versions. At the same time, allow any bugs in the older free versions to be patched for free. Users should not be forced to upgrade to a paid license to benefit from bug fixes. That being said, none of the restrictions in the personal versions are hard-coded, so you could violate the personal license and have more than one author, but then you would be in violation of the license.

  4. Oh yeah, WordPress is open source, which means it essentially belongs in the public domain.
  5. Here are some rather extensive technical reasons to switch to WordPress, the likely candidate of the moment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Software / Internet. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One comment

  1. Anil
    6/23/2004 at 4:59 pm

    Hmm, I figured I should respond to a few of these items to see if I can help clarify what your’e looking for.

    1. Well, there’s new stuff from 2.64 to 3.0, and we’ll have a bunch more new features in the general release that’s a free upgrade for 3.0 users. So new stuff is definitely something you can still have on MT, particularly if you play with some of the plugins at mt-plugins.org.

    2. Eh, don’t worry, not all of us at Six Apart like cute. I’m curious what specifically you mean (this is basically a company full of people who *weren’t* popular in high school) but I’ll let you give me more info on that.

    3. I’ve been to Austin a few times and it seems like a fairly reasonably priced town. (Certainly compared to New York City or San Francisco) so I’m curious about what you pay for the other applications you use, like your operating system, word processor, email client, or graphics apps. If you could contrast how the other apps you use every day are priced, and how many users they allow per license, that’d be helpful for me to see if we’re giving you what oyu need.

    3. I think we’re doing exactly what you’re saying. We’ve got a free version of MT that even lets you have Google AdSense ads or Amazon affiliate links, even if you *don’t* pay. That sounds even better than what you asked for. And then, yep, we ask commercial users to pay. And in the meantime we’re building out TypePad.

    But a lot of our MT users said they wanted to be able to just file a simple help ticket when they have a problem or question, and get a quick answer, and the new paid licenses for MT let us do that.

    As far as I know, there aren’t any serious bugs in the 2.661 version of MT. And users who are on 2.661 that are eligible for the free license can upgrade to MT3 for free if they want the new features.

    4. If you’re concerned about limitations in the software, WordPress does have an open license, but doesn’t let you have multiple blogs without installing the app multiple times. It seemes like one’s a legal restriction and one’s a code restriction, and I can only speak for Movable Type, but we’ve got a way for you to lift the legal restrictions just by buying a license.

    I hope this helps answer some of the issues you’ve raised, and feel free to shoot me an email if you have any other questions.