Originally published on May 17, 2004 03:37 PM
While I was attending to other matters (work-related, mostly, including an office move and an all-day meeting), Six Apart touched off a blog-world firestorm with their announcement of Movable Type 3.0 pricing in a post in Mena’s Corner: It’s About Time. Her post coincided with the release of MT 3.0 Developers Edition, and was greeted with nothing short of mass hysteria.
If you’ve been following such blog-world controversies for any amount of time, you know that things very quicly coalesced around two points of view, or so it seemed. In fact there is a third point of view, but this has been pretty much ignored by everyone.
In one corner, there are those who feel “abused” by the new pricing (really, that’s the word some are using) and think it’s obviously time to move to something free (as in speech), because obviously putting any hope in something free (as in beer) is a waste of time. Whatever. I respect the theory, but the way these objections have been expressed is way over the top - hysterical you might say.
In the other corner are those people who suggest that any software developer, particularly Six Apart, has the right to charge for its software at any rate it decides. These folks tend to call those who have any complaint about the pricing “freeloaders” and such. Nice.
But there is a third group. The members of this group totally agree that Six Apart has the right to charge for its software, and in fact is happy that they are doing so, because it is an indicator that the company can stick around for a while. At that, however, that reasoning leads to a major concern, a concern that can’t be ignored. To wit: Six Apart doesn’t seem ready to be a commercial software company. In this environment, their code, the program itself, is beside the point. It is the necessary but not in any way sufficient condition for success. Having a good product is important, and it’s clear that 6A has a good product, but that has very little to do with whether the company succeed or not.
The thing they need to demonstrate to the marketplace is that they can develop their product.
Product development isn’t just about coding up an application and then hoping people buy it. If you build it, they will not come - you have to do a million things properly before you can have success with a product. Something as simple as finding the right price point is a critical success factor - and this is made much more difficult when the previous price point was $0.00. Determining the feature set, figuring out how to keep your critical edge-users on board, and how to launch the whole thing - these aren’t just fluffy decisions that any engineer can make on the fly. And figuring out how to do all of that while NOT calling existing users “freeloaders” (as 6A comes very close to doing often in their missives)… it’s all hard work. But on every one of these questions, 6A managed to hit a sour note.
Product development is not just building something, but it’s building it, then marketing and selling it in a professional manner. In addition, they have to demonstrate that they can communicate clearly to current customers throughout the process, in terms of support, sales, marketing, and product PR. Clearly Six Apart has totally failed at this part of it. Just as clearly they are trying to rectify the situation, and I personally wish them well - but I have the feeling that they could be in a “too little, too late” situation at the moment. I know for a fact that I will happily pay for my personal license for Movable Type 3.0. It’s simply not an issue for me personally with my current set-up (though it could be if I go ahead with a couple of other little sites I’m considering). But as someone who makes decisions for corporate use, I could not, at this time, counsel that we use 6A software. The company simply hasn’t provided me with enough evidence that they’re ready to be the kind of company we can rely on.
