Well, all good things have to come to an end. MoveableType will now “cost”:http://secure.sixapart.com are essentially $150-$900 for the personal weblogs that I manage right now (this site, Geekfishing.net and the related sites).
The real issue here is whether they should charge or not, but they are making a classic “averaging” mistake. That is, getting $50/personal user would be a home run based on getting 100K users, but the price is way, way, too low for an enterprise where the department version should be about $500 and the enterprise in the $5,000 range. Most of the cost justification based on support. That would have been fairly typical. Ironically that averages to $200/customer, but that’s not the way you charge. Oh well.
Fortunately, there remain quite a few free services out there like LiveJournal and Blogger. With the improvements in Blogger, we’ll look that way for a migration strategy. Good thing MovableType is popular enough that there are easy ways to suck things out of it.
Personally, I would have moved to a more generous strategy on the free version, added a charge for technical support but at all costs kept the momentum up. The point longer term is to get 1M blogs on MovableType IMHO.

4 responses to “MovableType 3.0 Released: I'm so sad”

  1. a little ludwig goes a long way Avatar

    MT licensing uproar
    Our house was flu-ridden this week and I am just catching up on all the discussion about MT 3.0 licensing — good stuff by Tim, Mena and the changes, Mark Pilgrim, Simon Phipps, Rich. Personally I have no problem paying for…

  2. Rich Tong Avatar

    Probably are, although I think their main mistake is they didn’t have a professional investor to help give them some advice.
    Sometime I wish I had just flown down there and said, I really, really, really think I can help you. It is just so sad.

  3. Aventuras_de_un_webmaster.blog Avatar

    Los d?as de mi blog en MT est?n contados.
    Movable Type 3.0 ya ha salido con nuevas opciones de licenciamiento que no incentiva la actualizaci?n. Para manejar mis blogs personales voy a necesitar invertir USD $149.95 en una herramienta que es buena pero que tiene competencia importante en WordP…

  4. steve Avatar

    Do you think that they are cursing the “trackback” concept now?
    http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml

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