Over on Jay Allen’s blog I’ve posted a comment about Movable Type that sums up where I am with this blogging software.
Generally, break-up notes for a blogging product have this form: blogger attempts to upgrade product; blogger has trouble upgrading; blogger moves to another product and posts frustrated good-bye notice detailing everything that went south during the upgrade process as well as every small or large grump against the product blogger has held within her heart since time immortal.
However, in my case, it’s I’m Moving Out Soon, But Let’s Be Friends Forever. I don’t have a grudge against Movable Type; the upgrade to 3.3 went all right, even after the only support question I posed during this latest upgrade was answered had a brusque and useless response (received after I found and fixed the problem). This blog also sports one more tool in the anti-spam wars: an accessible “captcha.” When you post a comment, you need to type a word, which is presented in plain text–a nice concept to emulate for web forms in LibraryLand.
I also reinstalled Media Manager, a favorite plugin that allows me to rate and review books very easily, and pulls in data from Amazon. Media Manager may be the single most important reason I have stayed with Movable Type, but I’m at a point where I could let it go; support questions for Media Manager get answered very slowly, if at all, which is true for many Movable Type plugins. (Another common story in the land of blogging is of the developer who creates an amazing plugin for Six Apart products, gets hired by them or needs to go work elsewhere, and then no longer has time to work on the amazing plugin, which quietly deteriorates.)
I got to the break-up point with Movable Type not because things went wrong, but because they went well. I like the challenge Movable Type presents me two or three times a year when I have to log in to my shell account, remember how to use gunzip and tar, tweak permissions on files, wander into a MySQL database or two, and modify the MT configuration files. These upgrade episodes are not true geekitude, but it’s geeky enough for me. Like cookie-baking or swimming, upgrading my blogging software provides a long, pleasant fugue state where my brain can travel places it doesn’t usually get to go.
One of the places my brain went this week is to think about Movable Type as a viable product–not “is it working for me now” but “how well does this product fit in the world of blogging?” The answer made me a little sad.
I’ve written earlier about Movable Type’s awkward fit in the blogging world. Once upon a time, Movable Type was a frisky, even seminal product; these days, Movable Type is best defined by what it is not. It’s not an open source product developers can tinker with, it’s not free, it’s not particularly well-supported, it’s not a robust enterprise product, it no longer has critical mass, and it’s not for anyone who just wants to get up and running with a blog. In other words, it’s not WordPress, Movable Type Enterprise, WordPress MU, Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress.com. It’s more of a brachiopod–an animal that served its purpose, but now, despite its population density, will soon, and quickly, disappear.
I can go (at least) two directions with my blog: TypePad, which would free me from development concerns, give me a pretty interface, and let me focus on content, or WordPress, which would keep my hands slightly geekified and allow me to enlist the support of an army of WordPress lovers, who can hardly be wrong. I don’t need to make a decision right now, and partly out of sentimental attachment, I don’t want to. But I’ve made that key decision–I’m Moving Out–and that puts my relationship with Movable Type at least partly in the past tense.
I suspect Movable Type is maintained largely as a legacy product at this point, and the real focus for Six Apart is both the “enterprise” product for large organizations and TypePad. From a market standpoint, that’s reasonable. But to paraphrase a song, I already miss Movable Type, and I haven’t even left.
Posted on this day, other years:
- It's not too late to bake fruitcake - 2008
- Over the river and through the blogs... - 2008
- My new shed - 2007
- OCLC, Library Hotel Settle Differences - 2003
- OCLC Research Feed: Be Still, My Geeky Heart - 2003
- You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch - 2003
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your reasoning.
First, the expertise required to install, configure, and install MT is way, way too high for a successful enterprise product. I’ve built those, and I know. It took me several messages with MT support to get 3.3 running, and I am not lacking in geek cred. My expertise leans toward Python (eight years), Java (ten years), and internet (20+), so I had to do a lot of reading for the Perl/MySQL stuff. A successful install of MT/MySQL would be a reasonable job interview for some admin positions.
Second, maintaining a free/pro pair of products is no big deal. It is mostly a matter of bundling options and providing support. Enterprises want stuff that Jo Blogger doesn’t care about, like LDAP integration, audit trails, and Oracle drivers. Charge for those, consulting, and support, then give away the core, which isn’t useful to enterprises.
So why am I ready to give up on MT? Because it is an energy vampire. At Ultraseek (www.ultraseek.com), we worked our butts off to make upgrades effortless, and we were really pissed when we had to make changes that broke customizations. MT upgrades routinely break customizations, require new expertise, and offer invisible features.
I don’t really care whether it is open source or free. At this point, I’d pay something to avoid sacrificing a day (or two) of work to each upgrade.
MT needs a brain transplant on admin usability. It grew up catering to extensibility, but it is time to pay attention to admins, not programmers. In “What Color is Your Parachute?” the hiring manager’s problem is summarized as hiring someone to solve a problem without hiring new problems. The same thing is true for software. MT solves a problem, but it brings more problems with it. They *must* fix that to survive as a software product.
Hi K.G., as you might guess, I take issue with some of the points you raised, but I wanted to take a minute to (1) thank you for taking the time to express such a thoughtful look at things and (2) absolutely confirm that your feelings match those of a lot of the people who’ve been in our community for some time and are unclear on Movable Type’s path forward.
Chris Alden, our new General Manager for Movable Type, has articulated a great vision for MT going forward. He started with a lot of “friends and family”, the plugin developers and consultants who work most closely with us, and that took place at our recent Business Blogging Seminar and MT hackathon. Now we’ve got to share that same message with the entire community, including you.
I’m going to let Chris follow his pace and his own way of sharing that, but I want to make sure you know — the problems you’ve identified are ones that we’re acutely aware of, and that the whole team is busting its ass to fix. Without going too far into specifics, there’s clearly a need to vastly improve our total user experience for current users — MT is a different beast for people starting today, compared to those who’ve been using the system for years and aren’t starting from scratch.
In addition, we’ve actually invested a tremendous amount of resources into the community, but it’s not necessarily in ways that are visible to the average (or, in your case, above-average) MT user. There are literally dozens of small independent shops that specialize in deploying MT for a living, and we’ve been working hard to support them because they make business blogs (whether Enterprise or not) happen. At the same time, we care deeply about individual power bloggers, and I have to admit I have a lot of bias towards fixing our problems there because I feel I *am* one of those. To me, working with MT these days feels a lot like working with Photoshop. I can do everything, and it’s uniquely powerful, but I can see what needs to be learned from iPhoto and even from MS Paint in terms of performance, simplicity, and suitability to task.
Anyway, I’m rambling on, but I’d love to get the chance to talk to you in more detail about where MT is going next, through version 3.5 and more generally in all our future versions. If you’re up for it, shoot me an email to anil@sixapart.com or call me anytime on my mobile phone at 646-541-5843. If you give me a little bit of heads-up, I’ll loop in Chris as well and you can tell us what we need to be doing, and we’ll respond with what we’ve got planned.
Anil, thanks for your response. I’ll contact you off-blog. To ramble in return… what caught my eye this morning as I read your post was your excellent analogy with Photoshop and iPhoto (or in my case, PaintShop Pro or ULead PhotoImpact). I am an example of someone who appreciates Photoshop’s power but, having encountered the program a few times, is only to happy to do the same few, simple tasks in a much easier program. The difference with blogging software is that–on a much, much lower level than you, without any real insight into most of the files I am working with–I take a little pride in being able to maintain my own MT installation. I have actually considered using one of the MT shops to design and build my Movable Type blog (since quite frankly it’s extremely plain, among other issues) but I think, if I’m going to do that, why not just use TypePad and admit this is no longer something I do (much as once upon a time I wrote crude HTML, but now, at least at work, delegate that to people who can actually write robust, valid, accessible code)? I mean, dang, in my youth, I used to fix jet engines, once upon an airplane, but I bring my car in to have its oil changed and don’t think twice about it. My feelings about Movable Type may be more closely related to the general passage of time and the way things change when we aren’t looking. I spent this past weekend staring at myself in the mirrors of department store dressing rooms, trying on clothes for my new job, and repeated exposure to unavoidable images of my middle-aged body has painfully underscored the fragility of flesh and human endeavors.
Midlife musings aside, it is an interesting question where Movable Type fits into the blogging market. In some ways I’m less concerned about the occasional individual MT user such as myself (floundering as I am in this self-pitying solipsism) than in the “small independent shops” who represent a kind of artisanal confederacy we need more of in our culture–the mom-and-pop stores of the Web. I’ve met some of these folks, here and there, and they are really the salt of the digital earth. the question may well be how you keep them with a product like MT.
Walt, thanks for your astute comments, and my apologies that they went into the junk bucket. I guess I’ll be scanning both comments and junk for some time now.
I think you’re on to something important with your distinction between Jo/Joe Blogger’s needs and the enterprise model. Funny, because “LDAP” was on my tongue last week in reference to another product (“enterprise” chat). In fact… it’s ironic (though I think accurate) that MT has the internal challenge of programmer-centric software, as endemic as this problem tends to be within the open source community.
Karen-
Thanks for sharing!! Over the long weekend I migrated to from Blogger to MT *and* WP – switching back and forth between the two until I got all my posts (since 2001) correctly migrated. Thank goodness I had not turned on comments too! I still have to work with the templates and formatting, but am well on the road to being a WordPress fan. I appreciate your tip on Media Manager – I have been trying to figure out how to best include cover art. Here’s the Amazon Media Manager for WordPress – I’ll be installing it tonight!! http://www.sozu.co.uk/software/amm/
I’m worried that Six Apart went to developers and consultants first when they were working on features for 3.5. That is not how you expand your market.
Off the top of my head, the only enterprise tools to really break into the market in the last several years are Salesforce.com and the Google Search Appliance. Note that both of those are very close to zero-admin and neither is a software product. Hmm.
Step 1 for MT is to do good ol’ usability tests. Watch a non-Perl, non-MySQL person attempt to install MT 3.3. Don’t help them. Note that the order of steps in the instructions don’t match the order in the file. Watch them open the config file in MS Word. Note that it takes four days, even with tech support.
Step 2 is to start working on a ten minute install.
Step 3 is to provide prompt (expensive) tech support, track the cause of the calls, and fix them. Bruce Tognazzi lists seven tasks for good tech support. It is OK to lose lots money on tech support at first as long as you improve the product radically by tracking the problems. Think of it as buying information about your product.
Really, a blog appliance is not a bad idea. At a minimum, we need a software appliance for blogging.
I’ll add one more thing, a “what it is” thing… it’s a HOG. It takes so many more resources on the server than WP it’s truly amazing. Even a quiet MT site will regularly suck up an amazing amount of memory or processor power, it takes a mighty busy WP site to do the same.
It’s also expensive on a level I can’t begin to understand. I looked into offering it on LISHost and while I can’t remember what the cost was exctly, I know it was something close to double or triple what I gross.