Six Apart: Six Miles From Relevant
Thursday, July 13th, 2006 by MR
Yesterday Six Apart announced Movable Type Enterprise and v3.3 of their web publishing software, and what’s funny is that I didn’t find out until today that any announcement was made. Normally their software launches have been a big deal in the blogosphere, but for the past 6+ months the MT buzz factor has been languishing and their previously evangelic user base has been leaving them for greener pastures. I only found out about the announcement from Paul because nobody was talking about the release.
Movable Type Enterprise still doesn’t seem to be the MT Pro version we’ve been promised for a few years, so if you were hoping to be able to add new data fields or edit old ones then I don’t think this will let you do it. Some “catch up” features present on this release include the ability to easily add small pieces of functionality into your blog (widgets) and change the look and feel of your blog and admin UI without too much hassle (transformer plugins, style catcher).
To add insult to injury, Six Apart doesn’t think highly enough of its own blogs to bother writing about the news on them, instead opting for a typical press release that can’t be Trackbacked or commented on. This solidifies the direction that Six Apart is now headed in: a direction far away from their base supporters and fans.
Reader Comments
15 Responses to “Six Apart: Six Miles From Relevant”
Why worry about the ability to trackback/comment? Not like they care (obviously) what people think… especially those in the blogosphere. How absurd.
July 13th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
Mike, there is a very good reason a general announcement of 3.31’s release wasn’t made yesterday. Can you tell me and the audience what it was?
July 13th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
I don’t think that Typekey and Typepad breaking yesterday have much to do with making or not making an announcement on their own blogs. If their services being down were truly important, than they would have waited until today to drop the press release and blog the announcement at the same time.
July 13th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
The site was updated and press release put out prior to Typekey dying. You cannot download MT without logging into Typekey. Hence.
The site being updated specifically requires people to go to the site to know. Making an announcement on their blog broadcasts the message out to a much greater extent, resulting in a flood of people who…can’t download anything.
I can’t tell you why the press release wasn’t retracted. For all I know, there are rules about that. At any rate, the software was released. Technical issues after the fact don’t change that.
July 13th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
And since you’ll justifiably ask: I have no idea why the public announcement has still not been made. All I saw on the matter when Typekey was back up(after hours) yesterday was that it would be announced “tomorrow.” No mention of morning.
July 13th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I still maintain that Six Apart actually has a good head on its shoulders and there’s a greater reason + plan behind all of these changes.
July 13th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Su is dead-on. For the record, here’s how it happened.
* Software and HTML pages were pushed at 10pm on Wednesday
* Press release went out at midnight, blog posts planned for the next day
* TypeKey becomes inoperable hence MT can’t be downloaded
* Wait… Wait…. Bring Ops guys cookies…. Wait…. Wait….
* This morning, there is some discussion about a necessary maintenance window.
* For fear of launching and then hitting that window, we wait until sometime after noon today.
* We find out at about 2pm that the maintenance will not occur today or tomorrow, clearing our runway
* Two hours later, the blog posts are up.
I can’t say anything about the press release as I don’t deal with those and don’t know whether they can be retracted or not. However, I can tell you one thing about our traffic patterns: When we post on MT News, our site traffic skyrockets, especially if we choose to put that headline into the app.
By waiting until we were assured that we would not be afected by any TypeKey downtime, we did people (including you, Mike) a service. What’s interesting is that had we done the opposite, people would have complained bitterly. It seems we can’t really win either way, huh?
I appreciate your concern about our divergence with our customers although, fortunately, I’ve heard quite the opposite lately. However I can see where you might feel that we’re drifting away. We haven’t blogged much recently but then again, that’s what happens when you’re developing two releases in parallel on a tight schedule. You’ll see more activity henceforth. With TrackBacks enabled, of course, just like our announcement post.
Anyway, I do appreciate the feedback Mike. It’s always good to know that people are out there making sure to let us know when they think we’re screwing up. :-)
Jay Allen
Product Manager - Movable Type
Professional Products Group - Six Apart
July 14th, 2006 at 6:14 am
Gee it seems as if Six Apart has gone the corporate route. The company sells MT to businesses corporate style. They offer tech support and well yes they do appeal down to the lowest common denominator but hey that’s corporate for you.
I don’t think MT is as much a part of the bloggosphere as it once was. MT is aiming for a whole new demographic. Look at the success of livejournal.
While I can understand why old MT fans might be offended by the recent actions of Six Apart, you have to understand that they’re taking their business to the next level. It may be a less glorious boring corporate level with less parties but that’s that.
July 15th, 2006 at 5:50 am
It’s nice to read exactly what happened from Jay.
But what I’m really wondering is: are Six Apart as passionate about Movable Type as they were back in the 2.x days? Because it feels like nobody is interested any more.
July 17th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Well it depends on what you mean by passionate. Six Apart has dedicated more and more resources to Movable Type over the past year or year and a half. We’ve built up a large world-wide development, sales and product marketing team compared to the two engineers that were working on it when I came. We’ve got bigger plans than we ever did and you’ll notice that our capacity for creating great, usable and relatively bug free releases has increased greatly.
If you’re talking about Movable Type users, then yes, as a whole, the passion has waned. However, what you’re seeing is a transition from early-adopter market to wide adoption. Crossing the chasm, so to speak.
Back in the 2.x days, there was 1 engineer and 1 designer throwing up releases constantly (often bug fixes). There was rapid innovation as the program was small and early adopters loved talking about the software they were using. These days, both the program and the people using it are different. Many of the early adopters have moved on to other systems (particularly Wordpress) because Movable Type has become more mature and less “interesting” in terms of constant releases. This is a natural progression.
Today we have untold tens of thousands of businesses, professionals and prosumers using Movable Type and they aren’t the type to blog about their blogging software every day or even ever. What’s more Movable Type has become a stable, mature and useful tool, so there’s less to talk about.
I’m more optimistic about Movable Type now than I ever have been. There were dark days looming for a long time, but we’ve come out the other side and are looking extremely good.
July 17th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
So much for naked conversations. First there was the nofollow links, putting protection on blog comment links and trackbacks. Not-so-naked conversations.
Now non-RSS, non-ping press releases instead of conversations. This from the leader of blog software services. Disappointing is too mild a word.
July 17th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
“Many of the early adopters have moved on to other systems (particularly Wordpress) because Movable Type has become more mature and less “interesting” in terms of constant releases. This is a natural progression.”
I understand that 6A is targeting a larger market now (enterprise integration, expansion in Europe/Japan, etc.) however losing your early adopter’s praise can’t possibly be beneficial. Many of your early adopters were blogging back 5-6 years ago, and now they are the major forces in the blog world, so losing their support could be a very serious situation.
Many bloggers (including me) grew up reading and idolizing these MT early adopters, and seeing them migrate to WP for whatever reasons is disheartening and does make a larger percentage of your market rethink their blog platform. Expanding out to new customers is great, but is it worth the chance of alienating your first customers and supporters at the same time?
July 17th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
What’s worse is the documentation. There’s no online docs, neither a quick how-to for upgrading or first time-installing. You have to download a 5MB PDF. There are no clear upgrade instructions. The forums are down for maintenance! One of the coolest new features, tagging, are poorly exemplified in the documentation.
That said, I believe it’s a strong new version. It’s only a messy launch.
July 18th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
My school uses Movable Type.
July 19th, 2006 at 3:34 am
The recent updates to Moveable Type will just reduce the stream of leaving users, but it won’t increase their user base.
New users appreciate either the simplicity of Wordpress or the elegance and flexibility of Textpattern.
July 22nd, 2006 at 7:02 am
Add Your Comment
Comments are moderated because spam's not tolerated.
