21.Aug.2008 at 2:33 pm | Sunny
WordPress, Six Apart Movable Type, Which Is Better? Who Cares…
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The “Smear Campaign” has started. No we are not talking about the US presidential race, we are talking CMS! Have you visited Planet WordPress lately? For a new comer, it will look more like a Movable Type blog than WordPress, and if that were not enough, the MT folks can’t seem to keep their egos in their pants and try endlessly to add fuel to the fire.
For the sake of history, here’s how the events unfolded.
First there was Movable Type
For what it is worth, Movable Type is responsible for the popularity of WordPress. The licensing debacle of MT resulted in defectors opting for the new blogging ware called WordPress, which has since taken the leader position. Years later, Six Apart makes an Open Source version of Movable Type.
Fuel, Spark and Fire
Not long ago, Anil Dash, VP at Six Apart, rubbed the wrong side of WordPress users by writing a unprovoked criticism of WordPress, that resulted in mud-slinging, rebut, and even a commentary on TechCrunch!
Few months later, Anil followed his attack with this post where he compared the security features of his hosted service (Movable Type) to that of WordPress.com based on U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Vulnerability Database findings.
This triggered a post by Michael Krotscheck which alleged that TypePad, also a Six Apart service, essentially sucked. Anil went on to charge in the comment that he “wonders if someone out there is deliberately misstating what the system can do”, and this from the VP of a popular blogging platform caught a lot of attention and criticism. In response, Lloyd Budd, an employee of Automattic wrote about TypePad’s SEO issues, followed by Michael Krotscheck’s own rebut to Anil’s Anil’s comment.
WordPress, Movable Type, Which Is Better?
Really, who cares? What our friends at WordPress and Six Apart fail to note through this ordeal is that the average user is not concerned about CMS superiority while choosing a service. They are really looking for the simplest solution to their publishing problem; to fill a void as painlessly as possible.
If we agree that the average user is not a software engineer, she/he will most likely not know details such as which of the two CMS provides better SEO (or for that matter what SEO is) or which is safer. And let’s not forget that in the big picture, neither matters as much as it is made out to be. Some of spend a lot more time online than the average user, and even we have had our fair share of issues with our CMS. What we should instead focus on is improving user experience such that the choice of service is dictated by how the user interaction with the service, rather than the servicing yelling at the top of its voice that is it the best service for the user. The more noise you make, the less credible you end up looking in the eyes of the user; leave the fear tactics for professionals like our politicians.
Seth Godin says, listen to your customers, and you will soon learn that there is no more need for posts criticizing your competition.
1. Anil | August 21, 2008 #
Thanks, your point is well-taken. To be honest, we have always refrained from proactively criticizing anyone in our space, instead preferring to point out the strengths of our platforms for people to analyze for themselves. (That’s not to say we’re above having a little fun while doing it.)
But here’s a serious question — when an Automattic staffer falsely implies that Movable Type and TypePad store user passwords in plain text, a serious security concern, when it *is not, and never has been, true*, what should the appropriate response be? If Automattic’s own staff doesn’t have the discipline to keep from spreading misinformation, and indeed spends their time making childish parodies of our own work, what’s the appropriate way to respond?
Now, to be fair, this is definitely stuff 99% of users don’t care about. As a result, we have never included random people’s personal blogs in the dashboard of our applications — just product news and announcements. And we have literally thousands of posts focusing on the great positive things that our communities create, as well as our work, which we’re undeniably proud of.
What we’ve heard from our users is they love Six Apart being innovative, they love that our efforts like Blogs.com and TypePad AntiSpam and Blog It and tech like OpenID are beneficial to *all* bloggers, including WordPress users, not just our own customers. But they’ve also repeatedly asked “hey, is that rumor I heard from Automattic true?” when these assertions range from ridiculous to malicious. And that’s the sort of thing where simply being silent or allowing the rumors to be perpetuated does a significant disservice to our community and to our company.
But your key point is absolutely accurate: Regular users don’t care about technology. If you look at that very first post of ours on sixapart.com that you linked to, you’ll find the first key point i made is “It’s about the future, not features”. We believe it, and we focus on it, and I hope you’ll continue to encourage us and everyone else to focus on that, too.