Sixapart sells the Movable Type blog publishing platform and also provides the typepad, livejournal, and vox blogging platforms utilized by many bloggers. Recently, they've been outlining the details of an upcoming major revision to Movable Type, codenamed Athena. One of the key new features is that they are going to make it possible for programmers to modify the core objects in the system and have those changes reflected throughout the system all the way to the interface.
This may seem like a rather technical addition, but the key point is that it enables using Movable Type as a versatile lightweight publishing platform with much less need for programming than before. No need to learn multiple codebases as you create a community opinion sharing site or a multiblog site. In other words, the move has the potential to vastly widen the applicability of their Movable Type code base and therefore Sixapart's opportunity to monetize it.
The thing I wonder though is whether they are too late. In particular, the Django project has has had these advances since inception, and it has the advantage of being open source. You don't have to worry about someone suddenly pulling the code, and lots of people contribute to it. Furthermore, Django is receiving a real baptism of fire by the Lawrence Journal World and Washingpost Post in their interactive online properties.
Of course, sixapart also has big customers. The problem they face is more one of re-architecting an existing application with what seems like less community involvement.
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