Well, all good things have to come to an end. MoveableType will now cost 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.
Posted by rich at May 13, 2004 03:44 PMProbably 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.
Posted by: Rich Tong on May 13, 2004 07:17 PMDo you think that they are cursing the "trackback" concept now?
http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml
Posted by: steve on May 13, 2004 04:04 PM