Struggling Six Apart Begged for $2M Loan

This is actually really sad for me. Mena Trott and I were kind of bloggy friends back in the day when I ran "the tinyblog", and she ran "Dollarshort". We were two pretty darn early bloggers and it was still a small ecosystem.

One day she told me that Ben was going to turn the custom blogging tool he wrote for her into a product and wanted to know if I wanted to try installing it myself, with Ben supporting me over IM.

That installation (many times upgraded) is possibly the 2nd oldest Movable Type installation after Mena's.

I was overjoyed at their success and a little sad to see WordPress eventually eat their lunch and their other product fail to gain traction. I wish them success in all their future endeavors.

Sucks for Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal). They bought his company for stock (I think) then sold it for $25M cash to a Russian company (which users hated I believe). Now he's probably got a pittance of stock in Say Media, which will also probably fail.

Lesson: get cash or public company stock.

Hate to say this, but reading that article made me feel like I was reading Foursquare's obituary, 3 years from now.

Amazing, especially considering that during the early Web 2.0 days most people cited Six Apart as being the IPO candidate that will rejuvenate the tech market.

How did Six Apart screw up: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up

I always wonder, in cases like this, about the role that the underlying technology plays. Wordpress's choice of PHP meant that installation was easy, theming/modification was easy, and it would work on your crappy shared host with FTP access. In fact, that's why I used Wordpress, back in '04 or '05. Because I couldn't get MT working properly on Powweb. For a platform that needs to be ubiquitous to succeed, I guess you really need a ubiquitous programming language.

I can't even guess how many tools I never investigated because they required language or library support that I didn't have installed. One failed "port install" in the whole dependency and I will probably have to give up.

Maybe MT's failure to catch on had nothing to do with Six Apart's failure to catch on. Still fun to think about.

"One fifth of Six Apart’s portion will go to executives Ben Trott (who founded the company with his wife, Mena), Andrew Anker and Jeff Ash. The rest is distributed among the rest of the Six Apart’s shareholders."

If my math is correct, that means the founder gets $3.9M * 1/5 * 1/3 * 0.75 = roughly $200k post-tax.

Ouch.

IIRC, the biggest reason people moved away from MT was the licensing issue. I know it's why I did. It's sad to see the downfall, though.

That company would make an awesome case study. Where did they go wrong, exactly? My take: they tried to move (unsuccessfully) into social networking etc., and pretty much abandoned the blogging space into the hands of WP.

That, and just plain bad tech choices, like generating static pages which meant that your entire site had to be rebuilt after each blog post. And bad licensing choices.

The sad part is MovableType is almost solely responsible for WordPress's dumbfounding success.

If MT had not suddenly decided to go pay-only for version 3, it would not have made tens of thousands of people start looking for an alternative and there was WP 2.0 alpha/beta, a fork of b2/cafelog, one of the few open-source programs ready to take them on. MT went open-source for version 4 but it was too late.

Otherwise WP would have been just one of the many PHP based blog programs out there today with a small following, and many of us might still be struggling to code in Perl for MT instead of PHP.

I for one do not miss Perl at all, but believe it or not there is at least one website out there I made still running MT 2.66 from 2003!

What do think the role of Fantastico and other easy-install scripts had? Given a choice of a one-click install or download-upload-untar I usually chose the easy path myself anytime I would be setting up a quickie blog or site.

What if Pownce hadn't sold and stayed open...

In the 2003 to 2007 period, a couple of blogs I follow (whatever.scalzi.com , Brad Delong) all had constant technical problems with MT.

http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004350.html

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/03/15/

Or BradD, who has no fewer than EIGHT MT installs to try to get their shit software to work. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/housekeeping-mo.html

Wordpress won because, reason 0, it actually worked and didn't break all the fucking time. Particularly for enduser software, people severely underrate code that isn't brittle shit that breaks if you look at it cross eyed.