It’s the final chapter of the old Six Apart– literally. Say Media– the videoegg/Six Apart combo platter— has finally sold Six Apart’s Japanese business, something the company has been working on since before the VideoEgg acquisition. The buyer is Infocom Group, a Japanese software company. Bundled into the deal are the global Moveable Type business, an early TypePad code base that Say is no longer using and the Six Apart brand name. The price was undisclosed, but this wasn’t really a deal about price. These assets — once so important to Six Apart in blogging’s early days– just weren’t that strategic anymore. The company says little will change for Moveable Type users, because they’d already shifted the line of business to Japan pre-acquisition. This is more closure than anything else.
The deal isn’t huge news, but it’s an interesting milestone for the blogging industry. Moveable Type was at one time the core of Six Apart’s strategy; a behind-the-firewall software product to help any company get up and blogging in a controlled, secure way. Blogging was already an unsteady opening of the corporate kimono, but using an untested, hosted solution was a step too far for many of the Fortune 500 companies and large media giants like Conde Nast and BusinessWeek. I first used it when we started blogs at BusinessWeek, and the magazine was terrified. I can’t imagine us using something as open as WordPress. Moveable Type was like blog training wheels– important for a time, but sadly not so relevant now.