Had I known this, I wouldn’t have bothered

From the Salon article “Blogging grows up” way back in 2004, regarding the shift of Movable Type away from being “publishing for the people” and toward becoming an enterprise-level platform:

If you ask Six Apart about this, they don’t really deny it. Who is Movable Type for? Is it for publishing for the people? Not if the people don’t know much about installing a server-based Perl application, Dash says. MT is not an easy program to install and to use, and it’s not supposed to be easy. “It’s always been for professionals and experts,” he says. “As far as average bloggers go, you could say it’s a ‘pro-sumer’ tool — it’s overkill for people that need overkill.”

Odd. I don’t remember seeing that caveat when I signed on with MT right around the time that this article came out. In fact, I seem to recall having read much the opposite. It’s all by the boards now, of course, but irritating just the same.

A possible moral: Venture capital changes everything. Something I’ll keep in mind, what with Automattic/WordPress having gotten all flush recently.

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