This piece speculates that the big money in blogs will be in the blog tools. Maybe, but I don’t understand why any company would pay $50,000 and $150,000, according to the article, for blog software from KnowNow, a company I’ve never heard of, when it could pay for a multi-seat site license from Six Apart for Movable Type for just over $1,000. The company also mentions Open Text, another blog publishing system I know relatively little about, as well as Cymfony, a PR tool for monitoring blog posts, among other things (with a name that stupid, I am willing to predict its imminent doom). The article also perpetuates the myth that AlwaysOn is a blog. (I used to keep an open mind about that, but I’ve come to agree with most bloggers that AlwaysOn is so not a blog.)
BusinessWeek: Betting on Tools that Power Blogs
Open Text was, I believe, once a CMGI company. Open Text had nothing to do with blogging and appears to simply have jumped on the blogging bandwagon trying to forces it’s old “content management” software on the blogging community.
Comment by Steve Hall — November 12, 2004 @ 9:11 am
It’s funny, KnowNow used to be about a web services platform, and at one time had Meg Hourihan and Matt Haughey both working there, along with other early bloggers and Paul Sharpe, who’d go on to be our first server admin at Six Apart. But back then, they didn’t seem interested in blogs. 🙂
Comment by Anil — November 12, 2004 @ 11:33 am
Between $50,000 and $150,000? Did they not read the trackbacks on Movable Type’s 3.0 announcement? Someone should print it out and sell it to them for $1,000 as business research.
Comment by George Hotelling — November 12, 2004 @ 12:53 pm
so, like anything, it’s caveat emptor or buyer beware…that will be the battle moving forward…as people smell money to be made, bloated tools that cost great deals of money.. to pay for the sales and promotion staffs…will be foisted upon the execs that awake one day with an epiphany that their company “must have a blog”.
This is not a new phenomenon, happened with web pages, ebiz and internet expertise. Hopefully, enough education will exist to minimize the fleecing of corporations/small businesses that are embarking on the blog journey.
Comment by jbr — November 12, 2004 @ 1:17 pm
I think the BusinessWeek article really kind of confused what KnowNow does. They don’t offer “blogging” software like what SixApart or others do. What they provide is publish/subscribe messaging infrastructure for enterprise environments. Recently, as syndication and blogging has become more important to corporations, I think they might have been finding themselves working more and more with these technologies as part of the much larger problem set that they address. But, that doesn’t make them just another blogging company. They deal with a range of issues that blogging companies are simply not exposed to.
If anything, the bloggers should take it as a sign that blogging is becoming such a big thing that enterprise infrastructure companies like KnowNow are being asked to integrate syndication and blogging into enterprise solutions.
bob wyman
Comment by Bob Wyman — November 12, 2004 @ 2:33 pm
Ah yes, Steve, now that you mention it, I do remember Open Text’s name as a CMS vendor. Funny that these much larger enterprise companies are now reinventing themselves as blog publishers. Boy are their clients going to feel stupid when they realize they could get the same functionality from a real blog publishing software company for a tiny fraction of the price.
Comment by Rick Bruner — November 12, 2004 @ 5:13 pm
Plus ça change …
Rick Bruner, of Business Blog Consulting, notes that enterprise vendors, like Canada’s own
Trackback by jarche.com — November 13, 2004 @ 8:34 am
It’s amazing to me how many business people fret about ROI for their online operations and yet cling to content management systems that run $50,000 and more. I was on a panel on blogging/RSS for Philly-area new media professionals last week. Someone asked which content management system folks were using, and not a single person cited a CMS from the open source or blog tools universe. To be fair, many are managing legacy data and content that’s not easily integrated into the current generation of blog tools. Not everybody has their content in a MySQL database. I plugged Movable Type, but only one person I spoke with seemed a likely convert.
Comment by Rich Miller — November 17, 2004 @ 9:34 am
Likewise, I don’t see why any enterprise would spend tens of thousands of dollars with Sun, when they could just download Debian and throw it on a couple of servers bought off of eBay.
Hmm, let’s not perpetuate the Movable Type monopoly, no matter how good it is, there’s choice out there for a reason. That $50k could be buying a lot more than they’re making out.
Comment by Peter Cooper — November 19, 2004 @ 9:05 am
[…] Rick Bruner, of Business Blog Consulting, notes that enterprise vendors, like Canada’s own OpenText are moving into the bloggging space to sell their products. I have the same question as Rick though; ” … but I don’t understand why any company would pay $50,000 and $150,000, according to the article, for blog software …” It seems to be that the hype cycle around blogging is growing, and companies will spend a lot of money on “blog” software without first doing their homework. Like learning management systems (LMS) and later learning content management systems (LCMS), some organisations will spend a significant amount on “enterprise blog applications” only to find out that it’s not so much the technology as the processes and implementation that are really important. […]
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