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

scriptingNews outline for 9/28/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/28/2000; 5:24:37 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/28/2000
Msg #:21802
Prev/Next:21801 / 21804

Afternoon/evening pointers 

News.Com: Apple stock plunges 46 percent on lower sales.

LinuxWorld has a rebuttal to my What is Open Source? piece.

Rogers Cadenhead explains Radio UserLand. "I'm afraid I may have joined Dave's technology cult." Welcome!

David McCusker suggests becoming unpredictable to avoid ambushes.

Marc Canter likes this new Sony TV-and-computer combo.

Next directions in Radio UserLand 

Andrew Wooldridge suggests I take a month off and go to Fiji.

Thanks Andrew! (No sarcasm.)

Instead, I'd rather go back to Italy, or back to Radio UserLand.

The next steps are outlined in this post.

Salon spinning out CMS? 

Inside.Com: "Salon.com, convinced that its lowly stock is drastically underappreciated, is close to spinning off a homegrown content-publishing tool in hopes of unlocking some of that hidden-to-the-market value."

I was interviewed for this piece. I understand why Salon is doing this, their market cap is $21 million and Vignette's is $6 billion. And with all due respect to Vignette, it's quite possible that Salon's software does more and does it better than Vignette's. However..

The real value of Salon, as I have said in the past, is in their unique reputation for journalism that's Web-only. They have the best name, but others are catching up. Eventually content management software will be a deep and competitive category, priced in the professional software range, like PhotoShop or Quark XPress. At that point, it's hard to imagine that Vignette will be worth so much.

In a few years the market will figure out that the Web is a publishing medium, and a great pub like Salon will be worth a lot more than $25 million. Sure they have an immediate problem to solve, to get more cash in to survive the crunch. It's possible that spinning out the CMS will do that. But please focus on the value of your journalistic name, longterm, imho, that will be worth much more.



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