Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Feedback on www.userland.com?

Author:Oliver Wrede
Posted:9/5/1999; 10:23:47 AM
Topic:www.userland.com
Msg #:10605 (In response to 10604)
Prev/Next:10604 / 10607

Of course it makes complete sense that Userland is not Frontier. Microsoft is not Windows (and the Internet is not the WWW). But in the first recognition to users "Userland Software, Inc." is a vendor for software - currently just Frontier (which may be understood by many people as just a development enviroment for web applications).

To say "Userland is where we all live!" is a nice slogan - but it is dangerous to attach to such mottos if they are not agreeable to "all".

If the Userland-story-telling and news-scouting things would not have been there -- I would have erased the Frontier trial version after a week -- it just took me too much time to get results.

So you may tell your people, that Frontier itself can only be a powerful product if the customers are powerful users. Users get powerful if they are convinced, that spending time is worth!

You were disrespecting the customer support of Dell (Was it Dell?). You said they cost you to much downtime. How much downtime do you expect your new users will tolerate when starting with Frontier? I think you and your team would agree that starting with Frontier means to learn a lot about how it works. (I watched some doctors lately who wanted to maintain some pages and stopped exploring Frontier and turned over to Dreamweaver! Scripting is not their business and Dreamweavers fits their level much better.)

Personally I am underway in the deep areas of interaction with information. It is not just a pagedesign thing - it is a question of context. I am convinced of Frontiers context (thus Userland) not of Frontier. The doctors I mentioned did not care about that - so the dropped Frontier. That is pragmatic but not long term oriented. With your business modell (yearly rates) you have to radically illustrate long term qualities -- to show that Frontier will always be top-edge of the web business - even if it may have weaknesses in certain areas like stability, performance or security. That can't be illustrated on a product site - it would sound and look like the usual blablabla of usual product pages! I think (hope) your team members will agree upon that. If they do, you have a chance your customers will do as well.

Oliver

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