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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Trackbacks as zeitgeist
Well, I've said bad things about the trackback mechanism in the past and I'm still not wild about it, but Mena's Corner over at Six Apart is showing how well it works mechanically while giving marketing theorists all over the world pause for thought.

Mena announced that Moveable Type was going to a pretty traditional licensing model with metered usage, ending their peculiar not-really-open-source approach. It's pretty upsetting for a whole load of their traditional customers because the $100 entry-level price tag is really high for personal use and because anyone using MT for the family will be forced to pay up (in fact, my family would have to buy the $150 version).

Because every single customer (a) uses MT, (b) therefore sends trackback pings and (c) hates the new model, the announcement is followed by a stunning number of denunciations. I wonder if they will stand firm or whether they will attempt some damage limitation? The fact that a new (genuinely) open source competitor called Wordpress is looking really good has to mean that this is a suicidal marketing move. As one commentator has said,

The mob has spoken, and it’s publicly viewable on the company site.

I do hope my colleagues in marketing don't find out because there could be some pretty tricky questions to answer about using this medium for business.

Update: Plenty of comment as you've noticed I expect, but notable is Kottke where Jason spots the same big bug I mention above (personal pricing is broken) and gently highlights how out-of-touch Dave Winer is on this subject. Dave thinks that because I can claim for a $150 hotel room when travelling on business that paying $150 (probably annually as this looks like a traditional pricing tree) for software I use casually is no issue. Maybe he can, but for me casual software has a $50 ceiling, especially when there's great, community-supported software about.

Update: See my more recent posting for what Six Apart did to fix the problem.
Update: Changed "I can...taxi" to "I can...hotel" above just in case Dave was vaguely remembering reading this...
posted at 7:15 AM (UK) | |

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