It’s been interesting to read here and there about Six Apart being sold (or selling itself) to some ad network company thing a few days ago. What’s surprising to me is not that they sold but the relatively quiet way in which it happened.

Much of the discussion involves Six Apart’s unfocused and internally competitive product strategy over the last five years, including TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, the purchase and sale of LiveJournal, and a bunch of other initiatives. What they tried to do with Vox was interesting and different, but they failed to leverage their core strengths and motivate those of us who were loyal users to try it out—I for one didn’t understand what it was supposed to be until long after I’d dropped MT altogether, and they never reached out to people like me to give it a try.

As if to confuse people further, the newly formed company released a press statement stuffed with marketweasel doublespeak about “providing systemic ways for advertisers to engage the social consumer” and “deliver[ing] engagement across display and mobile. The result is advertising that is more efficient, useful and social.” Yeah, whatever. I just want to write stuff on my website, not be a shill for somebody else’s product.

MT was the hot weblogging platform of choice back in 2001 amid an unequal field of competitors; it was eclipsed by WordPress (to my mind, at least) sometime around 2006 or so and never regained its footing. My own history with Movable Type was relatively short: I installed it sometime in 2005 and ran it up until the point where comment spam made my life miserable; switching to MT4 proved to be a hassle due to poor documentation and a lousy support community, so I jumped to WordPress early this year and never looked back. To me, Six Apart seemed to stop caring about those of us who still wanted to host our own sites, and support for MT became an afterthought accessible only through careful Google-fu and the good graces of authors who took the time to document their solutions.

So farewell, Movable Type, and thanks for the memories.