Yahoo and Six Apart have partnered to pre-install Movable Type on Yahoo’s small business hosting. Yahoo’s hosting customers will now be offered Movable Type pre-installed. This should help Yahoo move a few more hosting units, and will certainly expand the playing field for Six Apart. It’s a good deal for both companies, particularly Six Apart.
And taken in a vacuum, this news is pretty damn boring.
But what is exciting is how aggresively Yahoo is attacking the consumer market right now. They are making bold new products that really resonate with consumers, buying best of breed web 2.0 companies and partnering with others.
And they are doing all of this in such a nice guy fashion. Executives are embracing and listening to bloggers and others,and the late nineties arrogance is completely gone. Yahoo is clicking on all fronts right now. Google’s arrogance and their “screw the customer” mentality is their biggest weakness, and Yahoo is taking full advantage of it. Success and humility is a pretty powerful combination.
I remember Yahoo made a guy a billionaire buying his dotcom business which broadcast radio over the internet. Yahoo didn’t need to buy this service nor buy it at that price. But that guy turned out to be very ungrateful and arrogant.
Look at him today – have nothing else better to do but cuss on his blog while Donald Trump is enjoying a content deal with Yahoo.
Please check your spelling. It’s MovableType (no e after the v) and also change your category spelling accordingly.
It would be nice if SixApart took this new MT code refactoring and upgraded TypePad with it… I still have to wait 15-20 seconds for the TypePad Stats page to load lol.
Michael, thanks for the link. I’d (obviously!) disagree with your characterization that this is boring news… the truth is, most small businesses are unfamiliar with, and possibly a little afraid of, blogging. Anything we can do to make it seem safer and simpler is pretty exciting to me.
And Mike, the performance improvements are because of the hosting environment that Yahoo is running MT under. (Called FastCGI.) TypePad already runs under an even more optimized environment, but we do hear you loud and clear that you’re looking for improvements on the statistics functions. As Google’s trouble with scaling their Analytics service shows, it’s a really tough area to improve performance in, but we’re working as hard as we can to do so. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks Anil. I certainly don’t disagree. It’s just hard to get fired up about hosting.
@femme: It’s actually “Movable Type” … two words =) even though I referred to it as that in the early days. Now its just MT, as its global now =p
Anyways, congrats to Anil and 6A.
@Michael: Ditto on the hosting, at least w/ Yahoo.
Michael, normally I would agree with you about Yahoo! treating its customers better than Google. But there is one major exception that keeps me from switching: Google has guaranteed that Gmail’s forwarding and POP access will always be free. This means I can change my email provider in the future with very little hassle. When will Yahoo! (and indeed, Microsoft) provide these two features for free, AND promise that they will always be free?
Michael,
I don’t like your charecterization of yahoo and google. I do believe google cares about its customers. it seems that yahoo is trying to do the in thing and win the minds and hearts of the tech underground. Yahoo to me seems very corporate and are doing these things because of the bottom line$. Google on the otherhand I believe have loftier ambitions.
The thing that sets them apart the most is their engines. IMHO yahoo takes a long time to index pages and doesn’t seem to provide the most relevant searches. Google is faster in their indexing (suprisingly MSN seems to be the fastest) and seem to provide the best searches.
Thanks for the clarification Anil.