Service upgrades

The latest upgrade of Movable Type by SixApart made a lot of fuss (725 trackbacks) around the Internet. The main fuss centred around the new pricing scheme (from free the paying for the main product). I agree with some comments that you should pay for software that you like. Everyone wants to make a living. Non-paying customers hardly have a reason to complain.

This discussion however shows the delineation between free and paid-for services of a portfolio. What should you give away and what should you pay for? I get the impression that SixApart made a reasonable decision here. They use however a tiering structure, which makes life a bit difficult. The tiering structure depends on the number of weblogs and the number of authors. They created a whole new scheme of problems on the billing and fulfilment end. There are other ways to do this (pMachine), but I do not know if there is a best way. And it is much more difficult to measure usage for software than for online services. Maybe they should add a service component, so they can measure the usage.

From a services perspective this event is very interesting. This event outlines what a service upgrade can entail. John Gruber says that any upgrade should imply new features. And bug fixes are not new features. Sounds good.