... licensing and marketing material needs to be beta tested, too, not just program code and user interfaces. Understanding your market to the level of detail they care about (and need) is really hard. The questions you ask when doing market research have to be understood in light of the market's thinking. The choices you provide for answers in a questionnaire may not always cover the entire spectrum as completely as you think. (Dan Bricklin)
The folks at Movable Type didn't test price sensitivity enough before announcing the move and generated thousands of blog entries, many of them on MT systems, about the pricing. They've since fixed the pricing model quite a bit, and I expect even more alignment to how people are using Movable Type informally instead of within the specific free guidelines they initially issued.An important element of this mistake that you shouldn't miss is that on posts like the one above on pricing revision or this one on Mena Trott's blog -- she's one of the founders -- the critique is right there on the same page through their Trackback system which allows blogs to ping each other when posts reference other posts. (It's not Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and it's not Technorati's outside-in link analysis, but it's useful nonetheless.)
So while the Trotts and Six Apart are being hacked to death, they're not a company that insulates themselves from these attacks and critiques; rather, the criticism is co-incident in Web space with the statements being referenced. This is an extraordinary development in business history. (GlennLog)
In response to concerns by their customers (as well as non-customers, Slashdot readers, and pretty much anyone with a blog and an opinion), Six Apart has modified the pricing structure for the Personal Edition of Movable Type 3. A couple of quick thoughts on this:1. Six Apart is listening to their customers. Based on the specific concerns of their customers, they updated their pricing in just two days time. That Six Apart has sincerely listened to their customers in the past and continues to do so as a quickly growing company seeking to sustain itself is worth some goodwill on our part toward 6A. Many other companies wouldn't have bothered.
2. The tiered personal pricing still doesn't make sense. (Jason Kottke)
