Give the hoohah over the future of Movable Type post Six Apart's assimilation into Say Media last week, I really couldn't refuse the opportunity to meet Jun Kaneko, the product manager for MT, who was in the UK on holiday until Saturday. He hopped into London on Friday to meet what might be described as the rump of the UK Movable Type community, plus Maarten from Belgium.
Maarten has throughly blogged what we talked about over on Movable Tips, but here's a couple of things I took away from the meeting:
- The reason that Six Apart KK has succeeded with MT in Japan where the rest of the company struggled worldwide seems to be a simplicity of licensing terms, that favours resellers and solution partners, rather than direct relationships between the software writers and the users.
- I never realised how anglophone-centric tech reporting is. Sure, I got some taste of it around mobile phone reporting, which often (usually?) neglected to analyse the very different markets in Europe or Asia, but the fact that MT is in fact, in the old joke, big - huge even - in Japan, has gone almost almost unreported in the English-speaking world. But then, so did the closure of Six Apart Europe (based out of Paris) back in the early part of this year.
I walked back to the office with the very clear feeling that Movable Type has a future, and a strong one, but what Jun and his team do over the next nine months will determine if that's principally in Japan, or in the rest of the world as well.
