In the aftermath of the Moveable Type plug-in contest, and with the announcement of MT 3.1, may I state for the record what’s obvious to many, but still no persuasive to some? SixApart (I’m through saying “Ben and Mena,” since that’s no longer even approximately the right characterization of the 6A troupe) executed a fine stroke of strategic differentiation. Since a pair of the things that set MT apart from alternatives (“rivals”) in the blogging software field is the tandem of a capitalized business structure (which the OS candidates can’t call on) (yet) and its plug-in structure (for which developers had been producing modules for years), they brought the two together and offered prizes for developing useful plug-ins. They treated positive developer relations as an essential dimension of their plan, cultivated a core of excellent plug-ins, cultivated an array of good plug-ins that didn’t quite make the grade, cultivated an even greater number of developers with some experience working on plug-in customizations for MT (who therefore are already acquainted with the ins and outs of manipulating MT, and thus stand to work more effectively with MT with future clients), and gave their users another reason to adopt/stick with MT (access to all these plug-ins), for the price of some snazzy hardware.
Well done, SixApart!
Posted by AKMA at July 31, 2004 06:27 AM | TrackBack