

Struggling Six Apart Begged for $2M Loan - percept
http://gigaom.com/2010/11/16/struggling-six-apart-begged-for-2m-loan/

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techtalsky
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.

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staunch
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.

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

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callmeed
So who is WordPress in this future vision?

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sewerhorse
Probably Facebook Places or Twitter Places

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nikcub
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>

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netaustin
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.

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drusenko
"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.

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nikcub
I can't find the source right now, but I remember it being mentioned that the
founders took some cash off the table during the first big funding round.

~~~
nostrademons
Sucks for the investors. $22M in and less than $3M out.

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lusis
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.

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petervandijck
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.

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ck2
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!

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gregpilling
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.

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

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earl
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.

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callmeed
I'm not that familiar with MT–does it break because of it's code or because of
how it's setup/deployed with Perl?

I agree with your point, but I think being built on PHP was also a big factor
in WP winning.

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nuclear_eclipse
From my own experience in trying to set it up, the hardest part for me was
setting it up to correctly generate all the static HTML pages and get them to
correctly post to Perl CGI forms for things like comments that would then
trigger a regeneration of the static HTML. It always struck me as an extremely
fragile setup.

Oh, and the theming ecosystem was non-existent compared to Wordpress.

