Movable Type vs. Wordpress War Heats up

June 6, 2007
Braveheart Ready for a WarA day after Movable Type announced that Movable Type 4.0 would be GPL open source, Movable Type has stopped their retreat from Wordpress and the battle lines have been redrawn. "Are you ready for a war!!!!"

Wordpress fans have been quick to attack Six Apart's latest move. Technosailor has a funny post titled Five Things Movable Type Learned from Bilbo Baggins, where he compares Movable Type with characters from the Tolkien Trilogy.

Mark Evans gives a nice synopsis of the history of Movable Type and ponders how MT lost its first-mover/early-mover advantage. Mark says, "In the tech world, all you need is one small, but crucial, mistake to find yourself going from the penthouse to the outhouse. In MT’s case, it was the decision to introduce a paid-version in 2004 that caused a revolt among its large and loyal user-based."

Movable Type/Six Apart did indeed lose its first-mover edge with their change in their licensing model, but is that enough to crown Wordpress the permanent "king blogging platform" in MIddle-Earth? I don't think so. Publishing 2.0 put it best when it said, "One X factor in this competition is 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.e. they weren’t anywhere near as nimble (or outraged by licensing fees) as independent bloggers."

That's exactly what happened with TMCNet's blogs. Awhile back I considered switching from Movable Type to Wordpress, but TMCNet has over a dozen blogs and Wordpress is not equipped to handle it. Wordpress is better suited for individual blogs not for managing several blogs. Movable Type on the other hand does a pretty decent job managing dozens of blogs in the enterprise.

Publishing 2.0 has an excellent point when the post says, "As for bloggers and other independent publishers, I can say for myself that I have a strong loyalty to WordPress and to the development community that has served me so well. Part of that loyalty is not tied to specific features or benefits, but a more fuzzy brand loyalty."

I would add to that by saying there is just as strong of a loyal following of Movable Type users as there are Wordpress users. In fact, many current Wordpress users are former Movable Type users, so they did switch "loyalties" because Wordpress offered a GPL open sourced model and Movable Type didn't. Now that this competitive advantage that Wordpress had is gone, the two CMS blogging platforms will compete on features alone. This is great news for bloggers, since competition will drive innovation and more features much more quickly.

Wordpress definitely has more brand "mind share" these days if not a stronger "market share" than Movable Type. However, I honestly don't see either blogging platform dominating the blogosphere. In fact, since Six Apart is leveraging the open source community and they have paid developers, I wouldn't be surprised to see Movable Type leapfrog Wordpress in features, functionality, and market share. Only time will tell...

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Comments to Movable Type vs. Wordpress War Heats up


  1. Garrett Smith :
    June 6, 2007 4:13 PM

    Tom:

    TMC should check out Wordpress MU (Multi-user) we have been using it in a number of scenarios and it is performing extremely well, even with dozens of blogs.


  1. Matt :
    June 7, 2007 7:45 AM

    "In fact, since Six Apart is leveraging the open source community and they have paid developers, I wouldn't be surprised to see Movable Type leapfrog Wordpress in features, functionality, and market share."

    WordPress has paid developers not just working for Automattic, but several other companies from b5media to the New York Times. It's been years since Six Apart betrayed their community with the pricing change, it's a long-ago memory. Since then people have continued to switch to WordPress because they think it's a better product, not because of its license or price.


  1. Tom Keating[TypeKey Profile Page] :
    June 7, 2007 9:40 AM

    Hey PhotoMatt / Wordpress founder,

    Thanks for the reply and giving me a heads-up that there are indeed paid developers working on Wordpress. There certainly is an impression that SixApart is more of a "corporation" and Wordpress is more of a user-driven entity. But perhaps I haven't paid more attention to what's going on in the Wordpress community.

    I've been meaning to try Wordpress for a couple years now, but I'm always busy testing VoIP & gadget stuff for TMC's magazines plus blogging.

    Anyway, I am glad to hear their are indeed paid developers working on improving Wordpress. Like I said in my post, the competition between Wordpress & MT will help drive more innovation and features more quickly.

    BTW, Over the years I've sporadically come across your articles. You have some really good content.

    cheers.


  1. Mihai Bocsaru :
    June 28, 2007 11:09 AM

    It's even easier to compare Movable Type vs. Word Press

    You now have a full featured Movable Type demo installation, updated on a continuous basis, that you could check out anytime

    Go and take a product tour right now!

    See how simple, intuitive and powerful the whole system is

    http://www.movabletype4.org/


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