I don’t get it. This strikes me as one of the more foolish business moves I’ve ever seen. The folks at MovableType are about to release version 3.0. This version is full of features that look to me carefully designed to make the product a lot more sticky; i.e. make it a lot harder to switch to a different blogging too.

You want your product to be sticky because then you can raise prices and if you stumble you’ll have time to fix the problems.

But right now MovableType isn’t particularly sticky. Moving to a new version is a always a pain in the neck. So version upgrades are always a time we people are likely to consider switching to another tool.

So what do these guys do? They raise prices before people transition to the sticky new version. Dumb. First you make it sticky, then you raise prices. Not the other way around! This certainly won’t kill ’em; in fact it might let them cash out sooner rather than later. But it’s going create some real opportunities in the standalone blogging tool market.

$69, yeah right.

Now where is that data export format? Gotta go.