Movable Type vs. TypePad

It's a coming of age for the blogging industry. We've got a full-blow business model issue developing at SixApart, the developer of both Movable Type and TypePad.

Jeff Jarvis has a good description of the issue up at Buzzmachine.

Jeff's recommending that SixApart divest one of the businesses to resolve the conflict. That's surely a solution, but it might be sub-optimal for the Company and its shareholders.

I agree completely with Jeff that competing with your customers is very problematic. SixApart needs to resolve that issue one way or the other.

But I don't agree that a company can't be in both the software and services business. It's hard to do both well, particularly in a young company. But i've seen some that have been able to pull that off. And there's a big benefit if you can. It would seem to me that much of the technology between Movable Type and TypePad is shared. And certainly the developing standards like TypeKey and TrackBack are more valuable if they are shared between both product and service.

So I would argue that the shareholders and customers of SixApart would benefit if the two offerings are kept under one roof, assuming the customer conflict is resolved.

One approach that SixApart could take is to just come out and say that they aren't going to license the MovableType software enhancements going forward (starting with 3.0) to blog hosting service providers. That's their perogative. If that's what they are intending with their new pricing scheme for 3.0, then they should just come out and say it and life would be a lot easier.

There is a huge customer base for Movable Type outside of blog hosting service providers and they could easily service that customer base without the customer conflict issues.

That would be my recommendation if I was an investor and board member of SixApart. But I am not, this guy is.

Comments

[scott partee]

I agree with what you say about it being hard to be both a services AND a software company. You are also dead right when you say that doing both can be very good for a company, but very hard to pull off.

I've been in the web world for over a decade now, and I've seen lots of young companies fall victim to this precise duality. I've even been at companies with this very identity crisis, and it can rip them apart. The developers want to plow ahead with "development" while the business development people want to surge forward wherever the money happens to be. I worked at web development firms that had created such robust sets of "classes" and frameworks, that they felt they had a product in itself, and tried to sell it and improve it, while the hourly consulting, coding, design and client services billing hours were the only meaningful entries in the books.

In SixApart's case, TypePad is obviously the more steady and controllable revenue, while MT has been driving the entire "industry" forward, at great expense in terms of developer time, with little return (I theorize) in terms of meaningful dollars.

To the extreme, I now work exclusively in the Fortune 100 world in a consulting architecture role, and these companies spend, literally, hundreds upon millions in Oracle licenses AND legions of Oracle developers. So it's not hard to see that when two sources of value are made available to the customer, they suckle quite voraciously if it tastes good.

Back to SixApart.

I think I support what they're trying to do in spirit, but I agree with just about everyone else in that they failed to communicate clearly (ironic considering their product is all about communication) their intents or they flat-out misinformed people (also a product of their product, given that most of the information people were relying on came from personal messages from the developers, officers and employees of SixApart).

Most people who bristle at the criticism of SixApart take hold of the "you whiners need to pay for great software that you've been getting for free" argument. While there will always be those types of whiners, I think the real complaint is in the fact that the release contains no new features, yet drastically alters the cost structure/licensing structure people are accustomed to. In the case of group blogs, I see a mass exodus from the MT platform unless SixApart addresses it ASAP (as they did with the whole "weblog" definition controversy).

In the meantime, as a very happy MT user, I can stick with my current version for as long as it serves my purposes, which seems to be for quite a while. 3.x may have that set of features I need in order to fork out more cash for an upgraded license (I donated for my current license), but until it does, SixApart has failed to incentivize the vast majority of their users to pay a single dime. If anything, they may have incentivized a lot of people to switch to (hopefully) TypePad, Blogger or (gasp) LiveJournal, which may have been their plan all along. I can see a lot of value in driving sites to the recurring revenue stream if possible.

Sorry for the ramble... New baby in the house makes Scott a bit delirious.

[scott partee]

Doh! Just read Jeff's post. He, too, agrees that SixApart's MT licensing is drawn up specifically to drive business to SixApart. Haha! I called it first on IM! ;)

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fred:

The problem is, in this nanoworld, who is a "hosting service provider"? If I host blogs for my grandma and aunt, am I a hosting service provider? Where's the line? One blog? Two blogs? Two hundred blogs?

That is precisely the (unsolvable) problem SixApart has now created for itself. There is no clear line between "commercial" and "noncommercial," between "personal" and "hosting."

If SixApart does what you suggest and refuse to license improvements to hosting providers, who are they (the little guys or the big guys and how big is big?... the commercial guys or the noncommercial guys and if your ad strip starts raking in big bucks does that make you commercial?)? Thus, if they do what you suggest then they in essence take the other tack: They shut off the line of software licensing as a business to advantage their own hosting business. No one with any ambition to host more than one blog will be wise to use their product. And that is precisely the pickle into which they've put themselves.

[fred wilson]

i think you can define what a hosting service provider is pretty easily. it's a company that offers blog hosting services for a fee. if you host for your mom and grandma, you wouldn't be a competitor to TypePad.

[Anil]

Fred's right, the problem's not that hard. And we *do* have a suite of new licenses for web hosting providers for MT, which we'll be explaining more soon. TypePad's always been licensable; That's how we have TypePad licensees in Japan, France, Spain, and soon Germany.

[scott partee]

Actually, I think jeff is honing in on a non issue, now that I think about it. THe original "Free" MT license did not allow for hosting, nor did the $150 commercial license.

Hosting was, in essence, a no-no in the old license, as was paid installation and offering MT as pre-installed software in a hosting account.

SA is not competing with their customers, because their customers were not hosting providers en masse. Hosting providers already required special licensing, from what I understand...

Sorry, more ramble.

[emily robbins]

I'm learning how to blog, and wanted to reference your post using the trackback link. For some reason, it is cut off in my browser (IE 6), and when I tried to grab it from viewing the source, I thought the link was http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/738940, but clicking that brings up an error message. Sorry for such a newbie question, but I'd like to reference your article using trackback and thought you should know that it is not fully displaying the link

[Emily from How To Blog]

Quick update - I changed the font size in IE to be "Medium" instead of largest, and now I can see the full link -- except it is the same as the one when I grabbed it from your source code. When I click on the link to your article in my blogging how-to it brings up a page that says:

(?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?)
- (response)
(error)1(/error)
(message)Need a Source URL (url).(/message)
(/response)

[note that in order for this to display properly, I had to replace every "<" with a "("

Does this mean that trackback is not working for your article, or am I doing something wrong?

Related to my initial problem though, is that typepad is not wordwrapping items that do not fit when an IE user has View|Largest Fonts enabled and the text does not fit. Is this a TypePad specific problem, or one related to the template being used? ALSO, when I go to post a comment, the edit box is smaller than the text that goes in it - so even though there is no horizontal scrollbar, it keeps scrolling back and forth when I am on the extreme left or right of where I am typing my comment. Hmm. Right now my blog is having weird problems with the description text not fitting in the header with Larger fonts on IE, so perhaps it is a typepad problem...

[Emily from How To Blog]

Sorry about all the stupid posts - I finally figured out the trackback system and that I should be using Permalinks to link to your article. I'm still having those same formatting issues whilst composing this comment - don't know if that's something that concerns you enough to investigate or not.

[Emily from How To Blog]

How come every time I make updates and republish my article that links to your article, it gets RELISTED in the trackback section? I am not trying to do some sort of spam here! How do you get the trackback feature to work such that it notifies other sites that you've referenced them only once, regardless of how many times you update your post??

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Nice

[Turnkey]

I finally figured out the trackback system and that I should be using Permalinks to link to your article. I'm still having those same formatting issues whilst composing this comment

[me.yahoo.com/a/szZNJZoU1P.B7hSFZbZ3wckpGFVjijvf9WCHFUogW_5S8gWk9bnR3nA-]

Interesting post. We were looking at using this with our new site.
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[trassydicosta]

TypePad has some definite advantages that may make it right for a business blog,
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