MT 3.0. Get your wad out.
Briefly (and roughly, since it’s 2.30 am already) then, my take on today’s Movable Type 3.0 release and its pricing scheme.
Good software costs money. Well, a lot of the time, anyway. Deal with it. That said…
Do they EVER need a full time PR person! ‘Mena’s Corner’ did very little to improve communication. The announcement was very abrupt and confusing. They could save themselves so much trouble if they got it together in that department.
So, beta testing had ended? How come we didn’t know? Hey, I had signed up for beta testing. Never did get in, despite being told everyone would be phased in.
The naming is confusing too. Developer? Huh? It took me a few hours reading comments and threads to find out there will be another version later on for non ‘developers’.
Equally, all the talk about ‘commitment to developers’ and other corporate quack meant zilch to me. Dumb user here, what’s in it for meeeeeeee? (What I got from it all was the impression I should be using TypePad, not MT. But I don’t wanna!)
How many announcements do you need? A blog entry here, a statement with quotes there. Yet nothing on the Six Apart homepage itself?
I am quite willing to pay. When Six Apart quizzed users on this, I said I’d pay $100 dollars for a version that had comment registration.
The site I ‘needed’ MT 3.0 for (and put on design hold for many months to wait for this release) can just about fit into the 6-author license. Just about. There’s not much leeway. Still, we could ask users to donate to get the next license up. or I could kick some editors out. Heh.
Since you can only install the free version on one computer, all the other sites I use MT on will have to stick with the 2.6xx version as I simply cannot afford paying for multiple installs. And that’s ok. (God knows, I can live without comments.) But I do think the schemes for personal usage at least need to be re-evaluated.
By the way… Blogger? That redesign/launch was some impressive timing.
Update: Here’s some other people who say a lot of sensible stuff about MT 3.0 ‘developer’’s pricing scheme.
17 Comments, Comment or Ping
Herb
It’s the per cpu limit that i find the most perplexing. It’s not oracle, it’s a blog tool.
May 14th, 2004
Caroline
I don’t even know what that means. I know what a CPU is, but how the heck do I know what the hosting people are up to?
May 14th, 2004
Milan
Did you ever consider moving to Expresion Engine?
http://www.padawan.info/weblog/movable_type_vs_expressionengine_a_comparison.html
May 14th, 2004
Hg
Yeah, the CPU limit is bizarre. If you’re already restricting based on number of authors and blogs, why the hell does the CPU matter? It’s like saying “can’t be used on machines with more than 512MB RAM”.
I notice that since yesterday the pricing page has had a serious revamp. The details of the free option are now at the top and then the pricing is shown in ascending order down the page (to soften the blow!) rather than the descending order of yesterday.
May 14th, 2004
Hg
Can’t decide whether or not to write my own post on this yet, so I’ll start here.
Phrasing of the whole proposition is very sloppy. “Not willing to pay for Movable Type yet?” implies that a) you are somehow a miserly skinflint (thus alienating many of the users with one sentence) and b) at some point it is inevitable that either you will choose to pay or you will be made to pay.
This is inconsistent with the “there will always be a free version” pitch. If there will indeed always be a charge-free version, if Six Apart believes that this is an important concept to preserve, when why take this condescending attitude to the people who choose to use it?
The conspiracy theory would that they want to force all the freebie-grasping hangers-on to find another product, so they can get on with being a proper software company. That’s a fine long-term aspiration, but being so blatant about it will undermine their brand at the very time they’re trying to trade on its value.
I’m staying with them and paying up, for the record. But I’ve seen software companies take this strong-arm approach before and it always rebounds in the end. I hope Six Apart is resilient enough to survive the backlash.
May 14th, 2004
Gordon
Yes. That Blogger redesign was a smart piece of timing - coincidence?? Or has Blogger relaunch forced MT’s hand prompting this unco-ordinated mish-mash of news and details…
May 14th, 2004
Caroline
Milan, I have installed, toyed with and considered most of the better known personal publishing software, including pMachine - but I haven’t used its follow up, Expression Engine, yet. I do like to stick with software once I’m using it, since it takes so bloody long to get used to other tags, templates, etc. MT is fab. I don’t like that it is perl/cgi, but otherwise I like just about everything about it. If I decided to switch to another package, it would definitely be the (Dutch made) Pivot - which is a great piece of software too.
May 14th, 2004
Vaughan
Ah, it’s a relief to come across some relatively clear-headed analysis of Six Apart’s announcement after looking down their Trackback list and seeing so many apoplectic entries with lots of capital letters from across the Atlantic (mind you, it must be getting Six Apart cursing the day they ever integrated Trackback - talk about the bad PR of almost 300 negative links at the bottom of the article).
I agree with the comments about horrendously bad PR - the announcement was shoddy, confusing, and the pricing page has already been changed once.
I muat admit to not getting as aerated as some people - I’m currently a one author with one blog kind of guy :-) and even when I get around to converting a couple of other sections of WYA into MT, I probably won’t exceed 3 blogs. My old Consequences thing would have to go out of the window if I wanted to run it again, though . . .
At the moment, I’m quite happy with MT 2.6-etc. I don’t actually *need* to upgrade, I don’t think.
Oh, I find things like this all so confusing. I might switch to Notepad - that’s great.
May 14th, 2004
e
Feel free to kick me out ;)
May 14th, 2004
JW
The PR sucked major big time. The license model is plain stupid (cpu part), prices are reasonable (although, I can use the FREE MT3.0), but the whole thing in whole is very confusing.
But like many other said and my own conclusions after alpha and beta testing the stuff, I don’t need to upgrade from 2.66x. Comment registration of comments with TypeKey? Not my cup of tea!
May 14th, 2004
Caroline
Comment registration is what we have been waiting for for about 3 years at U2log.com - currently, we shut down comments once the article shifts off the front page.
May 14th, 2004
JW
Comment registration is a good thing, TypeKey is a wrong implementation of it, to my opinion.
Not to mention that I registered my id with typekey in the alphatesting, bus somehow they lost my hint phrase, so they can’t recall my password. :-(
May 14th, 2004
chris
:( Not only does the new MT3 force me to dump a wad of cash to get the latest greatest, it’ll also push me out of a fancy schmancy editor title. Damn you Mena! :)
I’m really glad I didn’t upgrade my main blog to 3.0 beta - with 4 blogs and 4 authors I’d be forced to pay or dump the blog and start over with no warning.
May 14th, 2004
Caroline
Don’t worry Chris, I reckon I can fork out for the 9-editor version, it’s 150 dollars.
Plus, what the hell, none of our editors are full time. We can threat the positions as full time equivalents, and give everybody a 50% job.
May 14th, 2004
chris
50%? I’m lucky if I’m doing a 5% job there!
May 14th, 2004
Milan
It looks like the start of a real cms-war: 1000 free copies of Expression Engine for switchers at pmachine.com
May 15th, 2004
Ernest Garcia
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Jul 1st, 2004