With competition everyone gains, and you are right if we don’t stay completely focused on our customers, someone else will.

If there are rules of engagement within Automattic, it must be rather loose. I am not in any way suggesting that it is bad that Automattic folks freely express their biases on their blogs (we all have biases and mine got me into a lot of trouble), but from a PR stand point, negative campaigns serve no purpose, especially in the new media circuit.

I believe both WordPress and Movable Type have their own strengths and weaknesses; that is the nature of all competing markets, if these two products were “indistinguishable”, they would both not be in business at the same time, think about it.

Keep up the good work.

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.