| Sometimes you meet someone and you have a pleasant conversation with them, so you think they are nice enough, so you invite them to a party. Then at the party it is clear they are out of their depth, they are too shy or too aggressive, or both, with some odd mix of insecurity and uncertainty over how to behave. And then you wish you hadn't invited them to the party. That is my perception of Ben and Mena Trott, in so far as their personas on the web go (which is the only way that I, and most people, know them). It is astonishing that they were such early participants in blogging, yet they failed to ever find the right tone. I remember that my first impression of MoveableType was favorable. This was in either 2000 or 2001. I had the impression that it was the best blogging platform around. At that time, the world of PHP only had stuff like PHPNuke, which was unbelievably bad. Once TypePad got going, my impression of Ben and Mena Trott changed for the worse. There was the incident where Mena called out someone for being an "asshole" at SXSW, and then her awkward attempt at an apology: http://www.sixapart.com/blog/2005/12/words-you-shoul.html Is appropriate to use this language when you are talking to your customers? Even if this is your honest opinion, is this the best way to express yourself? If the goal was to alienate their user base, they went about it with scientific precision. I recall at one point Mena wrote a post where she talked about how her and Ben were trying to learn how to enjoy wine, rather than always drinking soda. To me, the post had a quality of "Everyone says blogging is suppose to be personal and we are suppose to be pioneers in this field, so I will now try a post on a personal topic." Possibly others enjoyed her attempt at being transparent, but to me the tone was forced and awkward. My overall sense then, and still now, was they were lucky to be early into blogging since if overlapped with their personal interests (Mena wanted to better organize her sewing circle by posting announcements online, so she asked her husband Ben to create some software that would make it easy for her to do so - this was the beginning of MoveableType). Once they realized they had something valuable, they wanted to commercialize (which is understandable). But after that they seemed to be in over their heads. They never seemed able to establish real rapport with their user base. |
Lol, I'm kinda surprised people still remember that, it was me she called out. It was at Le Blogs (which was her own conference, surprisingly).
For me SixApart failed because the founders lacked vision as they were not entrepreneurial types (your outline is spot on) and their success was all very accidental (and somewhat opportunistic by the folks that put money in to the company).
The best thing Ben and Mena had going for them was was that they were normal folks who represented the community, just like Matt Mullenweg over at WordPress. But the money people sidelined them rather than letting them find their own voice.
Switching Movable Type from open source to proprietary and then ultimately back to open source killed the project and in many ways is what made me move over to WordPress.
Finally, the company was awkward at business. You are right, I was a customer at the time of the incident (I was responsible for a large UK broadcaster's purchase of Movable Type) but the product (when MT was proprietary) had a crazy price point of $3000 (roughly, I think) - too cheap for enterprise and too expensive for small bloggers.
It's a shame and I feel sorry for those concerned despite what happened 5 years ago.