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

Re: Feedback on www.userland.com?

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/5/1999; 7:59:31 AM
Topic:www.userland.com
Msg #:10602 (In response to 10601)
Prev/Next:10601 / 10603

Give us a chance to percolate the changes down the tree and to do it tastefully without intruding too much. I want to put a UserLand graphic on XML-RPC.COM, for example, but I don't want UserLand to take ownership of the *process* at that site. Its independence is important if we want that standard to go somewhere. We learned this lesson hosting the Frontier-XML mail list in 1997 and 1998.

Same with Outliners.Com. UserLand is hosting this community, but I want them to feel independent of UserLand. In both these cases the association with UserLand is less important to us than the success of the communities.

Now for Frontier and DocServer and My.UserLand.Com, and News.UserLand.Com, and Mail To The Future, and WhoIs, and so on, the association with UserLand is fine, and putting a UserLand graphic on those sites is entirely OK.

I guess I misread your earlier post. I saw it as a total rip at what we were doing. What happened yesterday is that after much handwringing and procrastination we finally got to the top of the tree. Now we're going to work down from there. Nothing is cast in stone. You should now have a place to send people that gives them an overview of what we're about. Maybe our top-level page will eventually look like Andover's or Adobe. IMHO it works for Adobe, but not for Andover or Earthweb. They would do well to hire a philosopher instead of a marketing consultant, to figure out what all those sites have to do with each other. Adobe doesn't need it. This is the website of a company that makes graphic tools. If they ever want to be anything else, they have to start a new brand. They don't need a statement of philosophy, they already have one, it's branded in our brains, we couldn't forget it if we tried.

BTW, the Andover/Earthweb/Xoom problem is the same one we had at Symantec after being acquired by them. One of the first arguments we had was the trade show booth at MacWorld Expo. The Symantec people wanted us to brand it Symantec. We wanted to brand it MORE. I asked the question -- should we change the name of the product to Symantec? What would that mean to Mac users? (At that time we were the only Mac products in Symantec.)

Andover/Earthweb/Xoom came about thru mergers and acquisitions, as Symantec grew by M&A as well. The shit hits the fan on the Xoom membership page. Each of the different sites used different operational software and have different root domains, so they can't be integrated without a major overhaul, across all their sites.

This same gotcha is happening everywhere as the marketers rollup individual sites into portals, the brands may be related, but the software operating the sites are separate and integration is always very very hard to deliver. (Examples: Geocities, Broadcast.Com.)

One of the advantages of using a consistent runtime engine is that our sites *can* be integrated. Here's a key paragraph on the UserLand.Com home page that relates to this.

If each site were an application, think of Frontier as the operating system that allows the apps to build on and work with each other. When you license and install Frontier 6, you will be able to link into many of the back-end services and news flows provided by UserLand.Com, so in a way, your site (optionally) becomes part of UserLand.Com.

Now, if UserLand were to grow in a manner similar to Andover or Earthweb or Xoom, we could merge with or acquire sites that are compatible at a system level. This would mean we could do things the competition couldn't. This a key part of our strategy. I think the really competitive portals in the future will be widely distributed, but share a common operating environment, allowing integration. I think that will be a key competitive advantage.

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