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> large media companies and other enterprise users, many of whom adopted MT when it was on top and then never switched over to WordPress
I'm not sure this is the case. There's been significant large media and enterprise adoption of WordPress, especially int he last 12 months: http://wordpress.com/notable-users/
You have indeed signed up a lot of top media companies -- the smartest ones, really. But that really just represents the head...I know of many mid-tier and longer tail publishers that are still toiling away on MT.
Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
If Six Apart hadn't stumbled with MT, this page would not exist today: http://wordpress.com/notable-users/
And I'd likely be using MT rather than WordPress, and giving the "slant" to MT.
I post my thoughts about it here:
http://www.kinggary.com/archives/movable-type-i...
;)
In a one-to-one battle, I think WordPress has one big advantage over Movable Type: there are a lot more PHP hackers out there than Perl ones, myself included. That of course means more plug-ins, which means more features, which means more users.
If you need to manage multiple blogs (and not create a blog farm), I can tell you right now that Movable Type does a far better job than WP or WP MU. For the 80% who just want a blog though, WordPress does the job nicely w/o getting in the way.
Inevitable, the "open source version" will be or become a crippled version, and MT will have to refuse to commit third party features that compete with the unique selling points of the "commercial" version. I mean, if you actually believe in the power of Open Source, you "know" the open source version will be better then the "commercial" version.
However, if MT4 is any good (and the source a lot less crappier then the last time I saw it), somebody might actually start a successful fork that's actually better then MT's commercial version. That's usually the way these thing go.
So MT, so long and thanks for all the sourcecode....
The community behind WordPress and the amount of functionality it can have, through plugins, is amazing. I tried MT early on, found it somewhat clunky and moved to WordPress having never looked back.
Of course, this doesn't apply to the average personal blogger who has bought some pace on a shared host somewhere. As MT learned, most of those folks are either too cheap to buy anything or let their political opinions guide their software choices.
In the end, there is no money to be made trying to sell blogging software to those folks. There simply is no market there. People like to extol WP and other such their products as vanguards of a beautiful new open source world. But, the fact is that Matt, et al, couldn't sell WP into that market for $69.95 and up any more than SixApart could sell MT. And, as others have learned, the corporate world doesn't really care about the "free as in beer" aspect.
The Microsoft vs Apple comparision is cast incorrectly. First, the range and quality of applications available for Macs certainly seems more than enough for most Mac users. Remember, the downside of Windows apps is that you need to actually use Windows.
Likewise, people and businesses who use MT may stay with it because they like it, not because they are inflexible or lack the initiative to switch.
The architecture of MT and WP differ significantly, so much so that anyone planning on rolling out a site that will draw serious traffic really ought to consider both. Both have potential chokepoints. MT can suck up resources as content is posted or changed, but once a static file is posted, that's it. On the other hand, a busy WP site can readily overwhelm its database.
In other words, if you run a big commercial site on your own hardware, it may come down to a choice of which slice of that hardware you need to beef up. If you run a personal site, it probably make no difference.
I think that's false in the general case, and also false in this specific case. Our teams have always made huge contributions to open source, and you can ask anybody in the Web 2.0 space for corroboration. If you're saying "open source means abandoned", while I'm using Firefox to post on a site that's run by open source software, then you're just being absurd.
Regardless of the perception in tech geek circles, the audiences for all our platforms has been growing rapidly. Those of you who are old-timers might remember when the same group was *convinced* that MT's growth was coming at the expense of Blogger, not realizing that then, as now, the goal was always about getting new people blogging.
There are definitely people who focus on trying to get people to switch from one blog tool to another; We just don't think that's a sustainable method of growing blogging as a whole, so we focus on getting new bloggers started, and those new people are smart enough not to see a space where *everyone* is growing as a simplistic horse race. There can be, and always is, more than one "winner".
And I seriously take exception to the distinction between "open source" and "commercial" as if they were opposites. That is newspeak from the "open source is communism" crowd. Call it "premium" or "supported"
or something like that, but don't suggest open source in general means non-commercial.
As a Movable Type consultant and to encourage people discover the new Movable Type without any effort I've installed a fully working demo version at:
http://www.movabletype4.org/
Check it out and let me know what you think of it!
However, in addition to the changes with MT 4, there's also the additional features of MT Enterprise. MTE is targeted at professional publishers, universities, and corporations and includes LDAP integration, support for SQL Server & Oracle DB, and other advanced administration features.
It's also substantially more expensive than any of the other MT licenses.
Thanks for setting up that demo account Mihai!