Dave Winer is a Lousy Marketeer... No Offense

Recently, I'[m listening to Dave Winer explain Outliners and why they are
important. Now, I have been follwoing Dave Winer for a few years now and
I know what the full import of Outlining is in Dave's world.

You see... Dave's Outliner is a Program Editor that runs inside an
executive kernel with a database for storage. Dave's Outliner is "scriptable"... a script in his sandbox is an outline that performs magic. He has Outlines that
run major web services... outlines that can act as a PODcatcher or
a anti-spam filters. So how hard should that be to sell... how hard should it
be to give away?

Dave seems to think that the biggest audience won't care about the
programming aspects of his Outliner... so he's pushing that fact that
the Outliner can create dsitributed directories using OPML (Outline
Processor Markup Language). That's going to be a hard sell... but I wish
him luck. Poor marketing, I fear.

If Dave started telling people he was going to give away an Internet
programming tool that could make web sites... aggregate RSS feeds
from thousands of sources he'd generate a lot of anticipation for
the release of such a technology. It sounds too good to be true... like
marketing. But that's really what he's got up his sleeve.

The reality is that the sandbox for the Outliner is already out there...
waiting for a killer app. Dave's outliner may kick start the rush to
get the sandbox and learn it's secrets. Rogers Cadenhead has written
a book explaining the magic of Dave's Outliner Technology and it's programmable engine with it's object database. If fact he's giving a few copies away this week of this book at http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/

All this "OutLining" technology needs is better marketing... Only a few hundred
geeks get it currently and Dave's OPML may not be the Killer App because
he's courting a mass audience when he should be seducing the wanna be
geeks who love free software that can make cool stuff... They keep working
on grokking Perl or Python or Ruby or whatever and he could get some
portion of them to use his legacy... the Frontierkernel but frankly he's just
not a great marketer... He's just a great software guy and a futurist who
hopes to give the world what he already has... what he spent a career building: a programmable environment for processing information and
ideas... an Outliner... and so much more... anything you might be able
to envision doing with such a power. There's a learning curve and that's
why Rogers wrote his book. To open the power of the sandbox called
Frontier (and Radio when Userland sells it) and Manilla when it's used to
run a server.

Dave hopes someone will bootstrap Frontier into his Linux-based PDA...
It could happen. He'd certainly die happier if it did... he'd keep programming
away in this cool world he spent his life making and now tries to give away.

I stilll think he's a lousy marketeer... but that's OK. He hates those people
because most of them lie to you. They sell you crap that doesn't live up to
it's promises. Dave has something that exceeds our ability to comprehend it's
potential. Could you sell that? Could you give it away? You'd have to be a good
marketeer maybe.

Now... about that Killer App. Seed the hills... something will take root. Somewhere there is a mind seeking a cool tool to change the world.
Killer Apps are made by people like that... Andresen... Bricklin... Kapoor...
Winer... You?