Six Apart just announced a plugin for Movable Type called Workflow that adds much-needed functionality to this blogging product. But it’s not free: if you want a supported version–and if you’re a library, of course you do–it’s (sit down) $250. (Though you also get a chance to be listed on the developer’s website as a Workflow user, right up there with the opportunity to wear clothes emblazoned with the Nike swoosh.)
Two hundred and fifty dollars, to pay a separate developer for functionality already included in WordPress. If I read the licensing correctly–and has been typical of Six Apart products since they began charging, that’s hard to do–you can evaluate Workflow for thirty days, and perhaps after May 17, when I hand in my last work for the semester, I’ll do just that in a little FRL bake-off. Workflow I know from; MPOW is all about it.
Six Apart has a pretty good deal going on. It doesn’t have to develop its own product or promise its customers anything new; just get someone to write a plugin. I accept that for bells and whistles, but I find it specious for capabilities that most reasonable people would see as core to a product. That’s the current problem with Six Apart spam control, which has been primarily provided by a “free” plugin developed outside of Six Apart, MT-Blacklist, for which donations are “encouraged.” New spam software is in development, and donors are given “priority.” It’s very weird, and getting stranger by the minute (particularly as the developer of MT-Blacklist was hired by Six Apart–but apparently not to tackle spam control from within). You can “donate” to get support for a product that resolves a problem central to another licensed product, a problem so big Six Apart has talked about it on its own site, though not at length and not as part of an open discussion (which some of us might call “blogging,” a practice the company is oddly unfamiliar with). Ayn Rand colliding with Kumbaya.
Six Apart also has worked hard to develop its developer “community” who can now be seen as cottage enterpreneurs, seeking opportunities to turn Movable Type into the most expensive post-purchase consumer product since the Barbie Doll.
I don’t have an issue with free-market capitalism, and I’m not an open source cultic. I’m not even cheap; I will spend money for a good product. I paid for my Movable Type license and I’ve paid for other things I like, and if you ever want to hear a sob story, sit down with me and withthe voice of experience let me tell you about what it has cost MPOW to use “free” software.
But I am a consumer, and I’ve been on the ‘net a while. I see where this is going. Today it’s the Workflow plugin; tomorrow it’s RSS3 (note: I made that up!), or the Jumping Balogna plugin absolutely everyone is using, or features to facilitate blogging during weightless conditions, or whatever. Six Apart is starting to make Bill Gates look good. Microsoft may be the product of Beelzebub himself, but Old Scratch gives me the whole enchilada, not a tortilla and a quarter-cup of beans. And Satan does make good software, I’m aware, as I work with “track changes” in elaborate documents or sync my entire calendar with my Treo. By itself, without additional purchases–and particularly compared to the leading competition, WordPress and Blogger–Movable Type is looking increasingly primitive.
FRL doesn’t need workflow. I’m an Army of One. But if I were an army of two or more, and content delegation was important to me, before I spent $250 to bring Movable Type up to speed with WordPress, I’d see if I could make my own “donations” to help bring WordPress where it needs to be on a couple of features. (This includes the unbelievably annoying WordPress glitch where the entries and comments are delivered in separate RSS2 feeds. I’m aware FRL doesn’t print well–give me an F and slap my fanny with a ruler–but I’m heartily glad post comments do not flow in as non sequiturs, which to my bloggy, RSS-ified eyes simply looks clueless. Hint to new bloggers: eat your own dog food. Always subscribe to your own blog in every feed version it comes in.)
Once again, wearing my “library tech honcho” hat: If I were making an institutional purchase of blogging software–for example, for a library, or for that matter for MPOW–I’d make sure Movable Type had every feature I could expect to need within the budget year it was purchased. This is an impossible statement, of course, which is why I made it. You may well get what you want for now if you purchase a license for Movable Type–though I’m steeling myself for the day Six Apart charges for spam control (not directly, of course, but by pointing its users to a fee-based plugin)–but be prepared to pay for any new functionality that becomes important in the next year. I may pony up as needed, but only because I’m so busy these days that the idea of moving to a new blog makes me wince. That’s not a great endorsement of Movable Type.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Safe Passage from Grantistan! - 2006
- Chris Rose: 1 Dead in Attic - 2006
- Every Time You Hear a Bell, a Blog Gets its Wings - 2006
- Other Activities Afoot - 2004
- test - 2004
Good Analysis of RFID Hocus Pocus
Ping Backæ¥è‡ªï¼šwww.donews.net
Argh, I knew there was something I was supposed to look at about that LITA blog this past weekend. Note to self: Find where in the code WP is separating out the feeds, or forever listen to kgs griping about it 😉
I think there’s a few different issues you’re combining here, and a lot of your points are valid, but maybe it’d help if I cover a bit of our perspective on this and see if that helps you understand where we’re coming from.
First, we’re definitely focusing on updating MT’s core functionality with lots of new capabilities and features. One of the reasons we put a lot of time and focus into the release of MT3.16 was to stop having to do small .01 or .001 releases to fix bugs and have a solid, stable core on which we can deploy all of the larger features that are in development.
Now you say, in regard to the licensing language, “and has been typical of Six Apart products since they began charging, that’s hard to do” — we should be clear. Workflow is *not* a Six Apart product, and I’m sure, as this is David’s first product, that he’d welcome any feedback you can give him on how to communicate about his product. But I would ask what improvements we can make on our site to communicate about our licensing, since most people who’ve given us feedback since our site relaunch have told us that it’s vastly improved.
We’ll be laying out the MT roadmap in more detail in the weeks to come, but I think one of the things to focus on is that having a paid license doesn’t just entitle you to support, it entitles you to *complain*. We’re (very happily) beholden to our paying users to develop what they need and be responsive to their requests. It’s a level of accountability that gives us the responsibility to do unsexy things like going back and fixing little problems in the code, just to make sure that current users have a good experience.
Part of that good experience is having a controlled release schedule, which I think will be another benefit of Movable Type going forward. Blogging’s mature enough that asking people to update every few weeks is too much of a burden to ask when someone just wants to blog.
As to whether people will be asked to pay for substantial new functionality, I strongly disagree. We’re committed to making substantial new features available in the 3.x line, and updates are free for paying users. Now, we’ll obviously create new products and services that are available for pay, but in general the differentiator will be that we’ll only ask separate payment for products which have distinct markets, where everyone wouldn’t want to pay for functionality they won’t use.
Finally, you say that we’re not familiar with blogging. I’d ask you to subscribe to the main feed for the Six Apart site, which includes all of the various blogs on our site aggregated into one feed. (It’s at http://feeds.feedburner.com/SixApartNews ) Most days, there’s a couple new posts, and some days there’s upwards of a dozen. I think that’s better than most tech companies, maybe even better than most blogging companies, and undoubtedly better than almost every other company you’re a customer of. What could we do that would make you feel we’re blogging enough, or what are your expectations here?
(Sorry for rambling on in your comments, and thanks for the chance.)
I’d first like to focus on one comment. You say, “As to whether people will be asked to pay for substantial new functionality, I strongly disagree. We’re committed to making substantial new features available in the 3.x line, and updates are free for paying users.”
We’re having a disagreement about core functionality. In my opinion, workflow and spam management are two key functions Six Apart should be providing internally. By “should,” I mean that two ways.
First, I think as a customer I’m entitled to this functionality if it is available. Based on my experience, as a website manager, these are two reasonable features for a product designed to create and manage web content. Six Apart has even talked about spam as a key issue. So will 3.16 handle the spam issue organically? If not, why not?
You may disagree, but workflow and spam control are features available in other blogging products, so I’m not alone in this idea, and neither are your competitors. That’s where the second “should” comes in. It would be wise for Six Apart to bite the bullet and build in capabilities to keep MT current with other products. Now that you’re a product, not a “concept” or a warm fuzzy gee-whiz product for the Good of the ‘Net, and trust me I know about that transition, the loyalty of your customers is always about one release away from disappearing.
I remember WordPerfect 5.1, and I remember WordPerfect 6.0. Overnight, the best word processor turned into the worst word processor, and never recovered. I was really sad to say goodbye to WordPerfect, but 6.0 blew chunks.
WordPerfect never should have lost me as a customer. I was comfortable with the product, and I had used it for a long time (I remember using it when my arm was being twisted to use Wordstar–“look, it has pull-down menus!”). But in the end I wasn’t married to WordPerfect, I was married to word processing, and there was no higher power to keep me with that product when it fell behind what I needed and what was available.
Movable Type should never lose me as a customer. I have an almost pathological resistance to the crunchy do-gooder open source mentality that leads to people tolerating half-baked products that present huge losses in support issues and lost functionality. I’m thoroughly happy to stay with a paid product I like, and if you look at my customer record I got a break on my license because I was one of the folks who donated in the Early Days. I even gave you guys an hour or two of my time to talk about library pricing structures. (I was supposed to get a t-shirt. I’m still waiting for the t-shirt. I’d rather have spam control, but never mind. Where’s my t-shirt?)
I can understand paying or taking as-is some plugin like my beloved Amazon tool for sharing what I’m reading, even though if you were going to be really cool you would get someone to cook up a MT plugin for Open Worldcat, and don’t ask me what that is or I’ll have to cry. But for the life of me, explain what’s so sexy or bells-and-whistles about spam control and workflow. To me, that’s basic content management.
On the blogging, I’ll subscribe to those feeds. To be honest with you, I subscribed to what I could find from an occasional quick scan of the site, and that means Mena’s Corner. I would be very surprised if a CEO could blog every hour or even every day, but for heaven’s sake at least get somebody to post a little astroturf or something, even mentioning what’s already on the consolidated feeds if that’s where the action is. (When I finally get to put up an organizational blog, I’m going to have so much content evergreened I could be dead for a month before you realized it.)
Listen, I’m all about the carefully-managed unsexy upgrades. I’ve been living one for over three years, since part of the “management” was getting the funding to do it, and now that we’re on the last lap if it doesn’t happen Real Soon Now I’m going to rip off my clothes and have my middle-aged body run screaming down Middlefield Road right here in Palo Alto.
I appreciate that you took the time to respond here on Free Range Librarian, which has hundreds if not thousands of readers (who knows?) but is hardly an A-list blog even in librarianship. But I’m not convinced. Show me that MT gets it about providing current core functionality, and I’ll start sipping the SixApart KoolAid again.
K.G – I had been thinking of writing something along these lines – thanks for articulating it so well.
Anil: This “paid license doesn’t just entitle you to support, it entitles you to *complain*” isn’t really so – despite having a couple of paid licenses, every time I post a support ticket I get a very unhelpfull reply saying something along the lines of ‘mt doesn’t have this feature, and so we can’t discuss it, please see the plugin site’. Almost everything seems to be ignored – at least thats the impression i’ve gotten so far. It’s never – MT doesn’t have X feature right now, but it’s scheduled for 2007, or not on our list – it’s just a concise, Sorry, see eleswhere.
It’s fustrating that there is no ‘feature path/roadmap’ for MT, especially beacuase its still lacking a number of important features, like a better text editor, spell check (like gmails), true subcategories, tags, ajax interface, SPEED, better search, the list goes on. There are too many things which are provided by plugins and which should be a basic part of MT – like spam protection and so on. MT also needs something like workflow – it shouldn’t mean that now its available as a plugin that MT doesn’t need that feature built it.
Seriously, browse through the long list of MT plugins – I’m sure you would agree with me that some of them are providing basic functionality which should be part of the ‘core’ system.
As for a ‘controlled release schedule’ – it’s not a controlled release schedule till there is some sort of roadmap or schedule – as a customer, i don’t see any such thing – releases just come out of the blue. See projects like Fedora Core or Ubuntu for ‘controlled release schedule’.
KO’s point about a controlled release schedule is apt, and something I should have focused on as well. Give your customers some idea of where MT is going. It’s only a controlled schedule for you; for the rest of us working on budget cycles, we have to have faith that “lots of new capabilities and features” will translate into core functionality users need and could reasonably expect.
I also don’t consider it above and beyond for a licensed, commercial product to release a version that is relatively free of bug fixes. Yes, thanks, I prefer it when my commercial software doesn’t blow up on me.
The other problem with plugins that would be avoided if these services were core is when they offer functionality but at a steep price. I like the Amazon plugin, but the tradeoff is that I had to give up dynamic publishing, because the two do not coexist. But how could I ask the author of this free plugin (which emulates a feature found in Typepad, not so incidentally) to continue developing it when it’s a service he provides out of generosity (and it’s work he’s doing because an earlier version of the plugin seems to have been abandoned by its first author)?
The game theory behind MT’s “developer community” concept seems weak. MT seems to have trouble understanding it is a commercial product. For open source products, the plugin developer has some sense of gain. At least he or she is contributing to the common good. What is the payoff for a plugin developer for Movable Type? The occasional PayPal contribution? Is that truly equal to the work required not simply to create a plugin but as a plugin author observed, to maintain it? You could force your customers to pay extra for a plugin that provides core functionality, but what will keep these users from defecting to WordPress?
I concur on the support ticket responses for features MT is missing. I find that support is largely prompt and courteous, but has clearly been told that there is Movable Type and then there are plugins, and even when it is a plugin addressing a problem MT says is serious, such as spam (as opposed to workflow, which flies over MT’s head), it’s not their problem. Will this be the answer when MT users are paying $250 for Workflow?
Movable Type's Workflow Plugin
Movable Type's Wo…