by We’ve been on Six Apart Death Watch for six months now, and yesterday, the Second Sign appeared that 6A are slowly clambering their way down into a Death Spiral from which they shall likely never recover.
The first sign of Six Apart’s coming apart was the unfortunate — nay, ridiculously broken and misbegotten! — release of Movable Type 5.01, and then taking six months or so to put out a small “bug fix” without fixing the features they broke in the first place.
Six Apart so wholly ruined Movable Type with the 5.01 release that the product can never really be reformed — or even fixed — because the Admin backend makes no sense now and their forcing you to create websites to house a blog made was incomprehensible and proved they really had no idea how their software was being used in the real world.
I spent tons of money trying to get Movable Type to be a productive work tool — and confessing my failures was painful to my heart, destructive of my trusting mind, and a pitiful experience for my wallet — but I am stronger for the experience, and I am now happily ringing the internets ether right here on WordPress.com.
The Second Nail in the Coffin — err, the “Second Sign” — that Six Apart is falling apart, is beheld in the recent announcement that their heralded, and also misbegotten, blogging platform Vox is going belly up on September 30, 2010:
What will be the Third Sign that Six Apart are coming unglued?
Can the demise of TypePad be far behind?
The TypePad servers and software and infrastructure were so wonky and unfriendly when I was a paying customer for my WordPunk.com blog several years ago, that I actually ran to Movable Type to get a “fresher” and “newer” and, I thought — “more better” — blogging experience; but I can confirm for you now that both TypePad and Movable Type sucked equally harshly as blogging platforms.
Just exporting my TypePad blog into Movable Type was an exercise in frustration that also cost me a lot of money to hire someone to fix for me.
And so the Six Apart Death Watch continues, and I shall gladly sit back and watch them implode — or dissolve down the drain, I don’t care either way — and I’ll observe it all with relish, and a side of fries, because I’ll finally feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.
I created a vox blog but quickly stopped using it as I wondered, what’s the point? I already have a livejournal account! I hope that doesn’t fall next!
Hi Gordon!
Six Apart sold LiveJournal in 2007:
http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/02/six-apart-sells-livejournal-to-sup/
Now it seems like that’s a positive thing for livejournal 🙂
Yes, I think 6A needed the cash from the LiveJournal sale. Ever since, I’ve had the definite feeling that Six Apart are treading water trying to keep their nose above the rising current. Their personnel purge when Byrne Reese was fired was the first notice in a series of stunners.
Oh groan. Not them again! I remember so well all the trouble you had with Movable Type and so on. I hope this will put an end to the misery.
Oh, Ugggh! Yes, it’s THEM again! The former bane of my existence. Oooof. Yet, they’re still haunting me. It is fun, though, keeping an eye on their slow demise.