Interesting discussion over at The Blog Herald on the demise of MT compared to WordPress, and although the entire world knows I’m a massive WordPress fan these days, I’ve got to say that both Scrivs and Matt are wrong on this, wrong in that MT isn’t going to go away, indeed I’d argue that MT is actually going to grow…but you aren’t going to see the world plastered by “Powered by MT” anymore.
Why? because MT is actually growing before our very eyes…its called TypePad people! My understanding is that MT is still the base code for TypePad, although obviously there is a pile of tweaks on top of it. It will also grow on Vox. Now unlike TypePad, where I can remember Anil announcing that MT was the basis for TypePad, I don’t know what the source code is for Vox, but I would be very surprised if it didn’t share some MT code in the backend somewhere.
I think it’s pretty much a given that WordPress has won the DIY blogging “wars”, I also think that it’s pretty much a given that when SixApart announced MT 3.0 they abandoned their then user base as well…now I won’t rehash the history here again, but it’s a decision of the past, not the present. The old MT user base moved onto WordPress, and SixApart took a strategy that was more focused on financial return, and despite the morality of the decision at that time, there is little doubt that at least for the SixApart team it turned out to be a highly successful one…and of course the core of this strategy: the MT code.
As to whether MT continues as a stand alone product in the long term? who cares. It’s not where the big money is for SixApart. I’d think given the level of usage at a corporate level that it will for the foreseeable future, but in terms of personal DIY blogging…it’s already pretty much history anyway.
So heres to a successful future for MovableType: the code behind many of the big corporate blogs and a growing MySpace competitor in Vox (which BTW I think is great!).
Tags: SixApart, MovableType, Vox, WordPress
