There are a lot of parallels to compare Corporate Blogging today to where Email Marketing was 5 or 6 years ago.   Back then, Email Marketing was free.  All you had to do was download a ListServ application, configure a server or two, find and manipulate some plug-in applications for registration or bounces or unsubscribes or de-duplication or throttling or opens & clickthrough tracking or analytics.....and the list goes on.

In the end, some geeks might have loved all this tinkering, but from a business or marketing standpoint it was a nightmare.   The solution was all encompassing SaaS tools from companies like ExactTarget, Constant Contact or Responsys...

Superior tools designed for marketers, not IT folks.   In the end, both parties were happier.

The same discussion happens in Corporate Blogging Software.   "WordPress is free...why pay you?"    For the most part we hear this when IT folks are involved.   Natuarally as they understand the Compendium Blogware offering they start to see the feature differences, but the don't really understand that Free isn't Free. 

That is why I was so happy to see this post today from a big Technology focused Blog talking about how overly hard WordPress is:

"Recently I have started chatting to an engineer at Automattic, the mob which employs most of the lead programmers on Wordpress. They also run the Wordpress.com service, which is a big job — millions of blogs, tens of millions of monthly visits."
"I complained to him that one of my annoyances in life is how complex Wordpress actually is. Why? Because you don’t just have to configure Wordpress to get anywhere. To get it to perform acceptably you can either throw powerful hardware at the problem (which is how Club Troppo has done it since our donation drive last year) or you can implement a whole rogue’s gallery of tweaks and adaptations."

When you think about what your goals are with advanced business blogging the focus should be on engagement and traffic through SEO....not constantly tweaking software, messing with plug-ins or installing more powerful servers.   Let the Vendor manage that stuff....