Revised pricing structure for Movable Type Personal Edition (kottke.org):
Six Apart is listening to their customers. Based on the specific concerns of their customers, they updated their pricing in just two days time. That Six Apart has sincerely listened to their customers in the past and continues to do so as a quickly growing company seeking to sustain itself is worth some goodwill on our part toward 6A.
Or they didn’t read through the license agreement as carefully as their customers did. An hour spent sitting at a table, reading it aloud, and reviewing it would have been of some value. Again, this license agreement is the basis of the ongoing relationship 6A hopes to have with its customers. To see it undergo revisions within 24 hours makes me wonder how well conceived it was in the first place.
Jason continues:
What I feel is happening instead is that 6A is offloading a business problem of theirs that concerns only a small portion of their user base (i.e. the folks hosting 50 friends on one install) to all of their customers. Because of a few potential offenders, customers have to deal with pricing tiers, definitions of weblogs and users, keeping track of how many active weblogs and users they have, upgrading their licenses when they add authors or weblogs, etc. We shouldn’t have to do that.
This sums it up nicely: I’ve asked the same question in my earlier posts on this topic (I see a new category being created).
Someone somewhere — the VCs, the 6A management team — has forgotten the block and tackle aspects of starting a business.
# What are you selling?
# What does it cost to make and market the thing you’re selling?
# Who are you selling it to?
# Are there enough of them to make the business work?
# How much can you sell it for?
# Does that cover your costs?
# Can you make enough to meet demand?
To be fair, there aren’t a lot of examples of a product transitioning from the Internet gift culture to a commercial venture, so it’s not like the Trotts had much to draw on. But creating a revenue model that assumes the bulk of your community are freeloaders who have only been willing to pay $0.38 is tactless, bordering on clueless.
<aside> There are a few defenders of 6A who might take offense at my tone or my word choice: I’m actually trying to choose words that are non-judgmental and use an even tone.There are quite a few less-measured comments afloat. I do want 6A to succeed, and I hope they weather this. It’s a learning experience and those are often painful.</aside>
What bothers me a bit about this is feeling more inclined to migrate away from MovableType in response to the defenders and their dismissive attitude that having an issue with the license is tantamount to being a parasite (while at the same time lauding the Trotts for changing the license terms so quickly). It goes back to the disconnect I and others feel: there seems to be some privileged insider group that thinks the rest of us have seen the same things they have.
An example: I got a note from a vocal defender the other day, in response to one of my complaints, explaining that MT3 has a threaded processing engine which should alleviate a lot of the pain of slow posts, comments, and resulting rebuilds. That isn’t in any of the materials I’ve seen, so again the majority of us are asked to take it on faith while the inner circle takes us to task for our lack of it.
An Open Source project wouldn’t have this issue. Nor would would a more forthright and self-aware company. I think 6A can meet those expectations, if they can admit where they’ve missed them so far.