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April 08, 2005

Movable Type Responds

I sent my blog, "I Hate Movable Type," to Ben and Mena Trott, founders of Sixapart and president and CTO respectively, and to David Hornik, General Partner at August Capital, who's on the board of directors and a major investor in Sixaprt. I thought I might get some respnse to my squeeking wheel, and i did. Here is the string of emails:

First I sent them my April 4, blog, "I Hate Movable Type," and I got the following reply from Mena Trott on 4/5:

"Hi Charles,

I’m sorry that your experience with Movable Type has been far less than optimal. We, as a company, are willing to refund you the money you paid for your installation and software.

Additionally, because Movable Type is geared towards though who are more familiar with tweaking code and installation environments, I’d be happy to offer you a 3 month free trial to TypePad, our hosted service. The focus of TypePad is to get people blogging and not forced to deal with HTML, CSS or programming.

Let me know if you’d be interested.

Mena Trott"

Here is my 4/5 reply to Mena (I guess I can be familiar, because she was):

"I don’t want to use TypePad and pay a monthly fee after three months. I’ve invested too much time, effort, and money in getting my MT blog to work the way I want it. I’m taking a course in web design and construction and am familiar with HTML and CSS and can tweak code to some degree. I want the notifications on my blog to work like they worked before the upgrade. It’s absurd that it’s taking a month to fix the bug when a third party has figured it out.

It seems to me like you are doing everything you can to get me to switch to your paying service by not fixing the bug in MT. This is a classic and unethical bait-and-switch tactic in my view. Also, you are arrogantly blaming the victim by suggesting that the problem is that I’m not experienced enough to use MT when the real problem is that you sold me faulty, buggy software that is taking way too long to fix. Stop blaming the victim (the same attitude your support people have) and work on fixing your problem--the update. I’m not the problem, the updated version of MT is. Please be an adult and take responsibility for your faulty software, fix it, and install the fix on my blog."

The next day, on 4/6, I got the following email from Ben Trott:

"Hi Charles,

As Mena said, I'm very sorry that you've had such a difficult time getting this current version of Movable Type to work properly for you, and that the upgrade broke a piece of functionality that you were using. I can verify that this issue is fixed in the upcoming maintenance release of Movable Type--we've been working to make sure that this release is rock solid, and in total, the upcoming release fixes about more than 50 issues in the system.

We're currently finalizing documentation and finishing a final round of testing, and the new release will then be ready. If you'd like, I'm sure we can arrange to have the specific fix applied to your installation personally prior to the release--and of course, we'll be happy to upgrade your installation for free to the new release once it's released. I'm certain this will resolve the issues you're having with sending notifications.

Hope this helps,
Ben"

My reply:

"Yes, I would like very much "to have the specific fix applied to your installation personally prior to the release." Thank you so much for your customer-friendly, thoughtful response in language I can understand.

I will post your intelligent response on my blog."

And so I'm posting it.

What are the lessons here? Unfortunately, that the squeeky wheel gets the grease because too many Silicon Valley programmers write softare to impress their code-writing peers and believe their customers are all high-tech elites like themselves. They tend to look down and patronize real customers, as Mena's email indicated.

Ben and Mena Trott are married and Mena is the president of Sixapart and Ben is the Chief Technology Officer, but it was Ben who had the mature, customer-oriented approach. Maybe the tech department ought to take over customer service. Now wouldn't that be a switch.

Finally, I'd like to thank Ben Trott for seeing that the problem got fixed.

Posted by Charles Warner at April 8, 2005 09:25 PM

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Kimmy at April 9, 2005 12:45 PM writes:

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