Mike registers some concerns about the SixApart News from today.
My perspective, while cautious, is less pessimistic than Mike's. yes, we both have a degree of burn-factor from VC money and projects we've worked on (though I expect we both would admit that the money kept things going and provided a certain amount of life to try and improve situations that working w/o money wouldn't have allowed.
But where I disagree with Mike is how this will kill MT. Of course, the business plan still isn't entirely clear for SixApart, but it is beginning to take shape. When the Trott's spoke at Seabury a while back, they referenced that they would be providing some sort of ongoing support for non-MT-Pro users after Pro ships this summer; though I expect that may be a virtual fork in the product (revenue being what it is, that will drive features, and rightly). Since the code is not OSS, of course, that's a minor issue for people like Chris who have hacked things in to extend it beyond what the current plugin architecture allows.
What I don't see is that TypePad will be the only product. I hope that MT-Pro will remain a equal or peer product for this Trott-Dash team, so those of us who do want to preserve our own data (and the headaches that come therewith) can do so.
Also interesting is that news.com/ZDNet played this as a "taking on google" play. I suppose it is, but the blogger deal will be a smallish part of the google success story; advertising is their real revenue, isn't it? But this Will Be SixApart, these two products. More than $20 installs and donations could provide, but I expect far from Google's success.
Posted by esinclai at April 23, 2003 07:16 PM |
An obvious corollary is "Will Google see this as taking on Google?"
If so, unless Google is run by saints (a possibility, it must be admitted), MT users should expect some level of deprecation in indexing if not search results directly.
Can you run this by Sergey and Ev for me?
Posted by: mike on April 23, 2003 07:39 PM
i'm taking on more of a wait and see attitude. as a mt user who would and has happily payed for the product i'd rather give them the benifit of the doubt than write them off as sell outs. i see products like radio userland and i just shake my head when i think people compare that to mt. why not help the good guys with the better product come out on top? i plan on supporting mt pro and typepad when it comes out. as a member of the community i almost feel like it's a mission ... lol ...
as an aside, if they were to fold i'd bet they would release it as oss or someone would support their database format so it would be a trivial migration. there's always a path to another tool.
Posted by: sean on April 24, 2003 09:20 PM