-Ed Terpening, Wells Fargo Bloggoing Manager.

More importantly, the Wells Fargo blog is a great example of how a well-established, conservative brand can really do an excellent job of embracing the blogosphere. I think Ed's presence here really attests to that! :)

Best,
Vassil Mladjov

Really? All those developers writing OO perl plugins for MT, switched to hacking PHP plugins for WordPress? I've heard this story before. But where is the evidence?

Vassil, please email me details of your product.

B., you have a point there. I was thinking more of folks like Mark Pilgrim, Phil Ringnalda, et al. Developers who used MT and then very vocally moved to Wordpress.

Product maturity (stability, consistency, customer support, etc.) is much more important than community buzz. Simply because Wordpress is the current darling of the blog software industry doesn't make it a better product.

And the "mass exodus" (as you put it) happened a good couple of years ago.

Look, I use MT -- so I think it's a great product. But as a user I have noticed that the developer network around it isn't as strong as it once was.

jwilde

I think the real story here is why Moveable Type has had four or five different product managers in the past year and continues to bleed users to other platforms. This move reeks of desperation. They start giving away the platform and no one notices, yet when WordPress which probably had less than 5% of the market 2 years ago, posts about a minor release it gets hundreds of trackbacks. Most MT blogs I see are on old versions anyway.

"Product maturity (stability, consistency, customer support, etc.) is much more important than community buzz. Simply because Wordpress is the current darling of the blog software industry doesn't make it a better product."

As a MT user, I've felt like an unwanted child for about a year now. Bugs fester for months, the Pronet list has become half a dozen of the remaining MT consultants begging to get their bugs fixed so they don't look stupid in front of thier clients. (Many even say the only reason they're still on MT is because they love Perl.) Everyone is having trouble with scaling, and the solutions keep getting more exotic. I feel like the brightest minds at Six Apart stopped focusing on MT a long time ago, and honestly I'm not sure if it will be around in a year or two.

I don't even like WordPress, but it's what I put friends on now. Businesses I set up MT for are now asking me if I can switch them to something else, often at the request of their hosting provider.

I'm very glad to see a new marketing push around MT, even if it's for a version I'll probably never use. But until they fix the core issues with the product, which I don't even know if they can do and keep it in Perl, they're basically just a glorified marketing funnel for WordPress. They'll whet the appetite for blogs and do the enterprise schmoozing to get them started, and when it starts breaking under the load they will do something funky (like use something else for their comments, like NBC) or move to a platform without as many issues, most likely from Microsoft or Automatic. (Possibly Drupal, if it gets its act together.)

The product development and communications approach that Six Apart has implemented over the past year has resulted in a lot of angry/disenchanted people - perhaps it's on purpose but if it's not, the approach has completely backfired.

I say, on purpose, because this happens in advertising/creative agencies all of the time. The "deadbeat" clients get pruned. Why should Six Apart be allowed to do the same?

Six Apart is in a position to re-focus MT in the marketplace, and in fact, this is what they seem to be doing. It's not pretty, that's for certain.

Why should Six Apart be allowed to do the same?

should be...

Why shouldn't Six Apart be allowed to do the same?

Blog cloning is a long-awaited feature. Almost as long-awaited as LDAP (our key reason for moving up to Enterprise). The last 4 semesters, I have wasted dozens of hours manually "cloning" blogs that we had set up and customized for each student in a particular class. Thank you, Six Apart.

One key gripe that we had with MT versus MTE was that there was not much value-added, considering MTE's greater price. I'll have to play with the new version tomorrow, but MTE 1.5 may erase that gripe.

Our other gripe was that we had to hack MTE 1.0x to allow both LDAP and MT-authenticated users on the same system (some of our users are not in our LDAP directory--primarily auditors and members of one of our work-abroad programs). We would be ecstatic if we could toss our crude hack with 1.5.

To address a few of the points raised, NBC does still use Pivot for comments on a few blogs, as that was one of the platforms they've moved from. I don't doubt that not every one of their dozens of blogs has completed the migration, but I don't think your conclusions are valid. There are many, many sites scaling to far more comments than NBC's blogs have, with spam protection that they're quite satisfied with. I would readily concede that the process of setting things up properly is too difficult, and that might explain why you're frustrated here.

"I think the real story here is why Moveable Type has had four or five different product managers in the past year and continues to bleed users to other platforms."

That's false. Making false, unsubstantiated accusations just makes your legitimate points look silly and hurts your credibility overall. This is software, not religion.

"Everyone is having trouble with scaling, and the solutions keep getting more exotic."

I agree 100% that many of the conversations from our most engaged ProNet members are about scaling -- today we released the most scalable version of Movable Type ever. We've also worked with the community to continue to improve scalability in the future. Again, I can see how you would put a negative spin on this, but some would argue that we listened to our most valuable partners in addressing one of their primary concerns.

There's a larger point here, though. Scaling is an issue you face once you're succeeding. Having a thriving, growing, active community isn't an accident with Movable Type, it's what the tool was designed to encourage. You may wonder how other tools which don't scale nearly as well don't have such passionate discussions about scaling -- maybe it's because they don't support publishers that have communities the size of NBC's, or the Washington Post's?

"Businesses I set up MT for are now asking me if I can switch them to something else, often at the request of their hosting provider."

We'd love to find out how these installations are set up, so we can address whatever performance issues you're facing. Again, I don't argue that we haven't done a good enough job of documenting or automating best practices for scalability, but every popular platform that runs on thousands of different configurations has settings that need to be optimized.

The fact that you're suggesting, for example, that media companies with dozens of blogs move to platforms that don't even support multiple blogs (or only do so with beta-level hacks that involve reinstalling the application over and over) indicates to me that you're not being entirely dispassionate and unemotional about this issue. Fortunately for us, the audience for Movable Type Enterprise makes their decisions on a straightfoward, rational basis.

But here's the straight story: I'm a personal blogger who uses Movable Type. I'm aware of all the options out there, and know what each platform is capable of. I think MT is the best tool for me, and (perhaps because I have privileged access to their plans) I think MT is going to be an ever better tool for me in the future. We do care about all of our users, but we don't expend a lot of effort on maintaining our "coolness" factor. I'm not saying that to denigrate its relative importance, but just as a statement of fact. What I'm hearing echoes conversations we've had internally -- there's an intangible feeling that is also important to individuals like you, and you want us to pay as much attention to that as to core issues like scalability, manageability, integration, etc.

Got it. I think other enterprise software vendors should be so lucky to have a community that's this passionate. :) Take that, Lotus Notes!

How much money is being spent by companies on blogging tools/systems, such as MT Enterprise and others. What is the size of the market today, and what are the projections for the next 3 to 5 years.

This information would probably be the greatest testimony as to whether companies are finding value in blogging and validate whether an enterprise blogging strategy is viable.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Richard - we at Kalivo are taking a novel approach to enabling companies to pursue a holistic customer engagement process on the web, which includes blogging. Would love to review our Hub and Listener offerings with you at some point. You can see one running our own website at www.kalivo.com. Feel free to contact me directly.

"Adopt a dynamic and flexible solution that can grow with your needs. A plug-in architecture makes it easy to extend functionality."

These aren't features. It's release note padding.