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Tough love in Techville

It’s just not terribly dramatic that WordPress 2.5 is a day past its tentative release date; that’s what tentative means. As your mum and dad doubtless told you years ago, better to do it right than to do it over. It is somewhat more noteworthy that based on the number of open tickets on the WP Trac, 2.5 is just 57% complete. Coming on top of the earlier skipping of 2.4, it is bound to get some folks wondering. Still, there’s a new 2.5 release date - falling on St. Patrick’s Day, interestingly enough - and that leaves more time to check for potential plugin and theme issues before the upgrade. The wonderful theme in use here, Arun Kale’s The Morning After, looks to be fine even without the 2.5 capable upgrade that is in the works. As for plugins, I’m not expecting many problems. This is what test blog installations are for.

Much more interesting (from a pure spectator standpoint) is the recent Twitterfied exchange between WP’s Matt Mullenweg and Movable Type’s Anil Dash, and the subsequent commentary.

The play by play: Anil posted a cheeky invitation to WordPress users to “upgrade” to, ah, Movable Type. Matt called the tactic “desperate and dirty.” Anil replied, essentially, “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” TechCrunch cheerfully recounted the exchange and is hosting comments on it all.

Anil is certainly correct in his own defense: you have the right to tout your own product. He is an evangelist, after all; it’s in his job description. I’d add that you also have the absolute right to highlight perceived deficiencies in your competitor’s product. Of course, it’s surely written somewhere that your competitor also has the right to be mildly irritated when you do that.

However, after having stated in comments at TechCrunch that there was no “juicy attack quote” in his initial post, Anil proceeded to provide something fairly close:

It may well be that Matt isn’t used to the way that competition works when you’re a well-funded company with tens of millions of dollars in the bank. I know it took us a while to adjust to the reality of how perceptions change in that situation. But given that Automattic’s raised many millions more dollars than Six Apart, I certainly don’t think it’s unfair for us as an underdog to point out our strengths.

Now that is as patronizing a comment as you could ask for. “Welcome to the big leagues, rook. There is no crying in blogging platform services. Better pick up your game.” I am so sure that Matt appreciates the constructive criticism. I’m reminded of the tough love given the Obama campaign by Hillary. (I read too many political blogs.)

And that’s your “techmeme drama du jour.” Can hardly wait for the next act.

Speaking of politiblogs, big-time blogger Oliver Willis just made the jump (back?) to WordPress. Like me, he had recently been a Movable Type guy. Like me, he was frustrated by the difficulties of MT 4.0. Things are better now.

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