Geodog

Ben and Mena Trott: You forgot to dance with who brung ya

After I wrote the post this morning, Ben and Mena Trott sucker punch the weblogging community, I had second thoughts about it, especially the title, which has a moralistic and judgmental tone that isn't appropriate. If it wasn't for my belief that it is almost always dishonest to rewrite something that you have already published (and that others have linked to), I would take the post down. Instead, I'm writing a new version of it:

As I said earlier, Six Apart has the right to charge whatever the market will bear for their labor. So why are people so outraged, and why is it a questionable business decision? Is it just because Movable Type users are a bunch of whiners who want something for nothing, as some believe? I don't think so. Six Apart is reneging on a very public promise, and is treating the people who helped make Movable Type a success very poorly. A little history from a long-time user:

Movable Type owes its success first of all to Ben and Mena having done a great job designing, implementing and updating a product with an excellent user interface and superb documentation, and secondly to having it ready at just the right time to catch the blogging wave. But the third factor in Movable Type's success was the army of evangelists and contributors who sold the products to their friends, businesses and community organizations, and who contributed bug reports, bug fixes, responses on the bulletin boards, and great plug-ins. In many ways, Movable Type was treated by the community like a Free Software project, which it wasn't. But the ethos of the MT 2.x license, if you make money off this software you have to pay, if you don't you don't, was very similar to that of MySQL and other open source companies, so people, in spite of warnings, ignored the significant differences between it and free open source. From a business point of view, Movable Type Personal was the seed product, or the loss- leader, that sold Movable Type Commercial.

The other part of the history is that when Six Apart got VC funding and shortly thereafter started work on TypePad, it stopped work on its already announced 3.0 product, but didn't say anything publically about it for many months. Meanwhile, the Movable Type comment spam problem started and quickly threatened to grow to unmanageable proportions. As resentment and questioning from the user and developer community built, Six Apart finally announced that they would do a 3.0 product, then, shortly afterwards, Ben announced "The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade." Big Mistake.

Today, Mena announced that the personal product would cost, depending on how many authors and weblogs you run on it, from $79 to $189, for personal use. And if you have more than 10 weblogs or 9 authors, you have to buy a commercial license, from $200 to $700 and up. So, for instance, if students at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems wanted to put together a multi-author weblog for something like the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, which they did this year, the students would have to pay upwards of $700, or get on the phone with Six Apart to ask for charity.

So now many members of Movable Type's amateur developer and evangelist community, who contributed a lot to the product, are being asked to pay significant amounts of money to upgrade the personal and hobby sites they currently run, and that they aren't making a dime from. Ben and Mena reneged on their promises, plus they are charging more for very few new features. Of course people can always stay on the current free 2.661 platform, but who wants to sit on a dead platform?

Stepping back from the situation for a moment, business lessons I would take away:

1. Trying to get people to pay for a product that they have been getting for free is very hard. Getting them to pay more for less is almost impossible.


2. Don't comment on pricing until you have decided what it is. Certainly trying to appease users for being very late to ship a software product by making a promise about price that you can't or won't keep is very foolish.


3. Do a cost /benefit analysis before you decide to enrage your evangelist and developer community, and make sure the benefits are worth it.

Sometimes the benefits are worth it. As Alex King suggests, it may be the right business decision to get rid of the budget conscious, handhold-needing customers, and focus on bigger budget commercial customers. Just make sure the customers you shed aren't also your best salespeople. It may well be that Six Apart has enough in-house programming talent and enough of a commercial reputation that they don't need the army of volunteer contributors and salespeople any more -- I just hope they did this as a conscious decision.

If not, I suggest they change it soon. The longer they wait, the worse it is going to get. Remember New Coke?