With the release of Movable Type 4, the focus should be on its embrace of open-source technology. Instead, the launch has sparked a lively discussion about what many people have been saying for months: Movable Type is becoming a distant second option in the blog publishing world to Wordpress. It wasn’t that long ago that MT ruled the roost, and Ben and Mena Trott were the king and queen of the blogosphere – or, at least, the blog publishing realm. Today, the new king is Wordpress’ Matt Mullenweg, who embrace of open-source technology has attracted scores of developers looking to expand the Wordpress eco-system.
The question is how MT lost its first-mover/early-mover advantage? In the tech world, all you need is one small, but crucial, mistake to find yourself going from the penthouse to the outhouse. In MT’s case, it was the decision to introduce a paid-version in 2004 that caused a revolt among its large and loyal user-based. People who had enthusiastically wave the MT flag started looking for another option – and Wordpress became the platform choice for the in crowd. You could argue Apple’s became #2 the day it made one strategic decision: to keep the Mac OS in-house rather than licensing it to other computer makers. One decision, big consequences.
As always, Scott Karp makes some excellent points about MT vs. Wordpress. “The real competitive action is going to play out in the open source developer community and among bloggers and other independent publishers, who have rallied around WordPress.” He also points out that many businesses use MT while independent publishers and individuals are Wordpress users.
For more, check out Aaron Brazell’s information and entertaining post entitled: Five Things MovableType Learned from Bilbo Baggins.
6 Comments
When they introduced the paid version they should have given it a new name, so that Movable Type maintained it’s identity as THE free choice. Not sure how much this would help though, because there’s always the thought in the back of one’s head that they’re going to be spending more resources on the paid version rather than the free, and this is especially true with Typepad. If the development of Movable Type had kept up with the pace of Wordpress it might not be so clear cut.
Apple on the other hand, is a hardware company, and licensing their software to other hardware companies could have ruined them.
And here I thought you were going to say that MT was like the Mac because it’s more attractive, easier to use, prone to fewer security problems, features a smart UI on top of an open source engine, and has a long history of being underestimated.
Mark, for yourself and anybody else interested to do a checking and compare the new Movable Type vs. WordPress I’ve installed a fully working demo at: http://www.movabletype4.org/
Good luck!
Anil,
Touche! Appreciate you stopping by.
Mark
Personally, I see it differently. I see MT as Microsoft (or Mac per your suggestion) and WP as Linux since WP has more customizations.
Totally with Anil on the security thing. As WordPress has become more popular, it’s like the Windows of blogs in being prone to hack attacks. Great software — just bigger target.
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