Six Apart wants me to get excited about this:
Today, Microsoft is making some of their biggest announcements ever — if you’re even remotely interested in technology news, you’re going to hear about the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. But what you might not know is that these new milestones mark the first time that blogging can really be integrated between Movable Type Enterprise and two of the most popular software platforms in the world.
Now dont get me wrong. I used to like Six Apart, but again why use Microsoft Word. The future of companies is small. Small is the new big. I want tools that work for small businesses. Most small business owners I talk to are using Open Office, because its free.
Other’s use Google Docs.
I haven’t fired up Microsoft Word in ages. In fact I don’t know of very many people with a home edition copy of this software. I really want to get excited about MovableType. But the only way that’s going to happen is if they port that to PHP/MySQL for my entertainment. Give away all access for free and make it open source.
I know I’m dreaming. Anil Dash needs to find some new product to evangelize. Because he hasn’t been the most popular SA Evangelist, and he sure isn’t going to pass as Microsoft’s new product evangelist.
Originally posted on January 29, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
“Most small business owners I talk to are using Open Office, because its free. Other’s use Google Docs.”
I’m not sure who you are talking to, but I think that very few small businesses are using Open Office or Google Docs. Most of the users of these products are technology early adopters. To that end, I would say that many technology start up small businesses are using these tools, but most every other small business user is probably using MS Word.
Now whether Six Apart should be evangelizing on behalf of Microsoft, that is another question.
Graham,
Good points. I tend to try and interact with small businesses in my sphere. Yes, most of them are technology companies who are early adopters.
Although some others are folks who just dont see the point shelling out that kind of cash for a product that isnt that great.
David, you might read the post again. Or the title, at least.
No small business owners, whether the ones you’re talking to or the ones Graham is talking about are going to be using Movable Type Enterprise, which is what Anil is talking about there. Or an Oracle database, or probably MS SQL server, both also mentioned. Put simply: they don’t want you to get excited about anything; they’re not even really talking to you. The post happens to be somewhere public, and you happened to read it. Which blog readers have the nasty habit of assuming equates to their being the intended audience for a thing.
This isn’t 6A evangelizing Microsoft’s new products, though Anil himself does like Office 2007, and had an interesting take on Sharepoint several years ago. It’s about a product which you know…happens to have enormous market share finally being able to take advantage of this integration possibility. Feel free to write a corollary for the OpenOffice format; I’m sure it’s possible.
(Note I’m pretty much as thoroughly uninterested in this as you are, and use OpenOffice for that matter. But I do think you’ve completely missed the point.)
I haven’t owned a copy of Word since 1990, but that doesn’t mean a lot of the companies Six Apart is selling MT to don’t use Word as their only writing tool.
Sure, it’s probably crazy to use Word for any home edition blogging tool, but that’s not what’s going on here. It’s a case of “If I can’t use Word with it, I’m not buying it.”
MT also works with Oracle and LDAP. How many home users use either? Bsinesses do, that’s who, and that’s the market for Six Apart’s MT Enterprise product.
Six Apart seems to me to be adjusting their products to meet the needs and desires of actual paying customers. That makes a lot more sense to me than bashing potential customers because they haven’t bought into the millenial tech hype du jour. Let’s leave that for the Linux zealots.
>>” I really want to get excited about MovableType. But the only way that’s going to happen is if they port that to PHP/MySQL for my entertainment. Give away all access for free and make it open source.”
I missed that the first time through.
I said pretty much the same thing several months ago on a now-extinct blog. I’ll recant now.
Consider these two factors in the same equation: One, Six Apart is a business. Two, there’s no market for home user blogging tools. So, why should a business try to make money selling into a non-existent market?
For whatever reason, very, very few run-of-the-mil bloggers are willing to pay for their software. That’s why business like Six Apart and Expression Engine charge real money and spend a lot of time targetting businesses and other enterprises.
Meanwhile, WordPress effectively uses their free product as a loss leader to drive paying customers to their cash products.
I agree that MT needs the cobwebs shaken out, but I’m not convinced that a shift to PHP/MySQL would serve any purpose. Many, many entreprises do not use MySQL, and a surprising number ban PHP as a security risk.
But, whatever Six Apart does or does not do with MT in the future, it seems to me that its fundamental distinction, and benefit, is that it generates flat static files. That’s important to a lot of people who don’t want to watch their database server melt.
I’m perfectly willing to pay for a product. I’d probably pay upwards fo a 1k dollars for one wordpress installation.
It’s all about usefullness.
If you are a company that wants to blog, that requires employees to use Word, that doesn’t want to run PHP on your servers, and who wants to serve flat files, then WordPress and all the others aren’t very useful.
A lot of people, including myself, may think that kind of company is hidebound, but the world is full of them. It makes a lot more sense to change your product to fit potential customers than pretend you can change potential customers to fit your product.
Although if you are running Perl, PHP aint far behind. And I can actually take WordPress and put it on just about any database you want me to. Especially Oracle or MSSQL.
Bill check this out:
http://www.orablog.org/
Of course. I’m not trying to be an MT fanboy, I’m just saying that Six Apart seems to have identified a real market for their products, one that does not exist among the “home edition” blogging crowd. As such, it doesn’t make sense to me to bash them for faiing to chase after something that isn’t there.
I’ve got a Google query set up on “Movable Type” and “WordPress”. It’s all anecdotal, of course, but most of the WordPress hits I see are about themes. I see a few hits each week from bloggers who have ditched MT for WP. I also see an equal number of hits about businesses who have launched sites running MT, presumably the Enterprise product.
If I was 6A, I’d be concerned about bloggers switching to WP, but I’d be rather happy about the checks written by those business users.
I’m not sure why ‘home edition’ bloggers and bloggers that need a sign on their office are not equals.
I’m a huge advocate of lamp technology no matter the size of the building, company, or project.
Always will be. I support Expression Engine which does cost money. And other Lamp based projects that aren’t free.
I love WordPress, and even some paid stuff that Automattic does. Yes, I’m a paying customer.
:)
>>”I’m not sure why ‘home edition’ bloggers and bloggers that need a sign on their office are not equals.”
For me, the distinction is between someone who rents space on a shared host and someone who has already invested in IT and owns its own hardware, maybe an entire department, or who isn’t averse to buying the hardware (or rentng a server or two on a rack someplace) and renting a consultant to fuss with MT. Six Apart seems to be going after those kinds of customers.
From Six Apart’s perspective, I suspect that diference is that they have ample evidence from their experience when they started charging for licenses that the typical “home edition” user is not going to pay for blogging software. Imagine the ruckus if Matt announced tomorrow that all future versions of WP would cost $89.95.
I’d certainly recommend WP to anyone who has never blogged, and who doesn’t know the first thing about hardware and servers. I’d point them to a reputable shared host with automatic WP installs.
But, I’d also recommend that a business take a good look at MT (and Expression Engine), especially if it had an existing infrastructure that could support it. (MT can also generate pages in a number of formats other than HTML, so that might also be attractive to certain folks.)
And, again, the kicker for a lot of people is going to be MT’s static pages. If you don’t want/can’t support/are afraid of generating all those MySQL queries to build content before it gets served, then WP can’t help you (even with a souped-up cache).
Well I work at home, have a significant infrastructure IT wise. I have 3 servers one shared. That one is for personal and development use only.
I handle all my own data backups. I have no sign on the door. You’d think MT would love my business.
I would love to run MT. Static pages is my dream. But the user interface is horrible. The rebuild times are a disaster.
And the core code sucks. The plugin availability reaks to high heaven.
I’d recommend a business stay away from MT until they realize the limitations. I take it you use MT and thats great. I did too. But in order to grow my business content wise. I had to switch to WP.
Su,
The point is taken. SixApart doesnt want to talk to home edition bloggers, or small business. They have set their eyes on bigger enterprises.
Joy for us who worked on MT. Or offered feedback over the years. And used and evangelized their product.
Yuck yuck yuck.
The point is taken. SixApart doesnt want to talk to home edition bloggers, or small business.
This post keeps making me wonder that I’m not reading the Blog Herald. I think I’m done for the moment. The amount of interpretation you’re investing in everything related to this is positively Freudian.
They have set their eyes on bigger enterprises.
God forbid. There be monsters.
You seem to have read something I didn’t write, and then objected to it. Maybe I should explain: There are approximately a quarter billion active users of Microsoft Word. Some people put the estimate at half a billion. I think those people should be blogging, as all of us at Six Apart do. To me, ignoring that audience is arrogance, it smacks of wanting keep blogging only for a select few.
We care deeply about small businesses and home bloggers — most TypePad users are small businesses, as are most non-Enterprise users of MT. And for personal bloggers, Vox and LiveJournal and the free version of MT are the best tools out there.
You clearly have an emotional objection to the fact that we’re *also* targetting business users of blogs, and I frankly don’t know what to do about that. We think it’s just as important that businesses blog as it is that individuals do so, and that presents requirements that might not seem cool to you. So be it. We just didn’t want to give up on businesses blogging, and we didn’t want to farm it out to some third party that doesn’t give a crap about blogs. We wanted to do it right, so we’re doing it ourselves.
You say, “Most small business owners I talk to are using Open Office, because its free. Other’s use Google Docs.” If this is true, you’re living very far inside of a quite unusual bubble. Normal small businesses use MS Office, or perhaps the WordPerfect suite, depending on what’s bundled with their PCs.
And part of what you’ve said is exactly my point — you say you could get other tools to work with Oracle or Microsoft SQL or whatever. MT supports both of those databases, along with MySQL and Postgresql and SQLite, and the’yre actually supported right out of the box. To imagine that a business which is willing to pay for Oracle is going to want to run a hacked-up version of an app on top of it is delusional.
As for me personally, I’m sorry if you feel I’ve been ineffective. My measure for my own success is whether I’m getting new people to start blogging, not whether I’m getting cool points from existing jaded bloggers. I don’t take that audience for granted, by any means, but it may just be a case where that single blog post wasn’t targetted at you.
Given your focus on individual bloggers, I submit that you should compare our investment in Vox to whatever platform you choose. I am completely confident it’s better than anything else out there. In fact, for someone who’s never blogged, I think recommending anything else is folly.
As far as scalability, MT powers blogs for the Washington Post, General Motors, Walmart, and most of the biggest blog networks in the world. In fact, Advance publications switched their blogs to MT specifically because of its superior scalability, as did Ziff Davis and dozens of others. I would readily concede we haven’t done a good enough job of documenting the ideal way to configure your blog for high traffic, but to extrapolate from your own experience to what works for others is as inaccurate as thinking that the small businesses you see are typical.
David, I’ve used both. Neither makes me ecstatic. We’re still in the first generation of blogging software. Currently, I’m building a site with MT, after first building it on both MT and WP. I’m going for the static pages angle. I don’t use many plugins in either platform, and I don’t like WP’s widgets.
I don’t find MT’s interface to be any less attractive or intuitive than WP’s. Both are too slow and equally unintuitive. One’s blue, the other’s pastel green. Frankly, I use MarsEdit to post, so I don’t spend much time in either interface.
Yes, rebuilding seems to be an issue when you’re rebuilding an entire site. That’s especially true on shared hosts with limited resources. It’s less of an issue if you’re not on a shared host. 6A also offers some tools that, in effect, spread the rebuilding load over multiple servers and that can, if you choose, rebuild certain files per a fixed schedule.
But, it’s also true that shared hosts have database limits that bring some WP users up short. People should not try to run substantial sites with real audiences on shared hosts with any blogging software, especially if their income depends on it.
Besides, if you’re gonna do flat pages, you have to create the pages first, and that’s what rebuilding is. WP trades that load for the load on the database. Figure out how to do “instant” static pages without running them through a tempating engine, and one that could also accommodate dynamic changes (like comments) without rebuilds, and you’d have a killer product.
I’m not qualified to know if the “core code sucks” or not. Ditto about WP’s code. I don’t care, really.
Since MT seems to be selling their enterprise product, presumably your objections don’t matter to those customers. But, while they’ve been doing that, the singleton user has opted for WP. (I won’t say “singleton market” because I don’t believe it’s there.)
I’ll agree that MT, in its current incarnation, is a hard sell to the typical non-techy singleton blogger using a shared host. Those folks shouldn’t be using any self-hosted blogging tool, anyway, and should just stick with WordPress.com or TypePad or Vox or whatever. Life is too short to worry about servers unless you make money doing it.
Su,
I actually recommend people read other blogs. I don’t recommend people living in small bubbles. Sorry if you have to threaten to leave if you don’t agree with my opinion.
Kinda childish if you ask me. Just leave if you don’t like the coverage.
Anil,
This reaks of delusional arrogance and idiocy.
Number one I do recommend on occassion MovableType it really depends on the end user.
I know plenty of people in the corporate setting that I would just as soon use WordPress. Yes running on LAMP.
Yes WordPress powers some very cool blogs too. Is this a giant pissing match? Not my point.
I actually asked for many invites to MT business summits as I do lots of consulting work with big companies. And yet I was ignored many times probably for reasons just like this. Arrogance. I do recommend MT. I can’t remember the last time I followed up to see which a business chose. But yet I recommend it.
I have no problem investing in corporate blogging infrastructure. My problem is this is not something huge. This is integration.
Guess what. Microsoft Integration already works with WordPress. Big woopty do. This isn’t some huge development that’s going to change corporate america.
This is backward thinking. How to capitalize on profits in reverse is great. But MovableType used to be a forward thinking company. That’s why I tend to disagree that this is something I should, or any business owner should get excited about.
Vox is fine. But why all the ads. I’d just as soon recommend WordPress.com as they have many of the same features. Without the ads.
I’d just as soon recommend WordPress.com as they have many of the same features. Without the ads.
LiveJournal has an ad-free level, too, and supports many millions more accounts plus has opened up its back-end infrastructure to help power sites like Digg, Wikipedia, Slashdot, and Facebook. Plus our LJ team has created open specs like OpenID, which is one of the coolest bits of yes, forward-looking technology. Any reason you wouldn’t recommend that instead?
It’s a matter of usability. I’m more comfortable coaching people in WP as I use it for business and what not.
I’m a paying member of LiveJournal.
http://onebigdavid.livejournal.com
My whole point in joining 6 months ago or so was to support the healthy community there.
Yes I’m glad they are developing tools.
I’m just as critical of WordPress.com trust me. Matt hears it from me all the time.
I’m passionate about tool development because I think we are a long way off to being anywhere near the point of easy to use for the rest of society. Although we are making progress. With MT,Typepad,LiveJournal, Vox, and others.
I have always supported SA in terms of financially. If they ever went public I’d be one of the first to invest.
My problems just come from a lack of forward thinking. Vox is great but its not all that revolutionary. It’s complex and complicated to be honest.
Again Anil sorry if I came off as harsh. I’m tough on companies that I think can do a lot better.
I will continue to support the company in dollars and cents. I’m sure I will continue to get blown off for these business summits, and I will probably continue to recommend my clients use WordPress just because I can fly out to their open conference and contribute.
Thanks again.