June 18, 2004
Liza Sabater
Talk about a weapon of mass destruction. I have not been able to even fully digest what went on but basically DW woke up one day and shut down Weblogs.Com and with that single act he erased 3,000 blogs from the web. Just like that.
There are no valid reasons for anybody to single-handedly do something like that. From a business stand-point, what you gain in the short-term you lose in bad word of mouth and mistrust in the long run.
No gift is given unless the giver gets something back. He gave those blogs away because they had a monetary value to him. He could at least announced he had no purpose for them anymore and either find a solution through the community of give people time to bail. He did neither and that only means one thing : Weblogs was not about building a community; it was about building Dave Winer. Once they lost that purpose, all was left was to pull the plug.
No courtesy, no remorse. Only loss of value for his name and reputation.
See:
Wired News: Thousands of Blogs Fall Silent
allied: Jeneane Sessum Blogs about Writing, Life, and Loss
Burningbird » Deference
Netcraft: Sudden Closure of Weblogs.com Strands Bloggers
Posted by liza at June 18, 2004 10:19 PM
Fyi: All is not lost;
http://newhome.weblogs.com/hostingTransitionPlan
As you know, I don't always agree with Dave, and certainly an advance head's up might have yielded sooner help and less carping (but maybe not).
However, I didn't get why everybody was jumping on him about this. He did his best. He tried. We all fail at things or if not we never try anything difficult. I'm not saying that people shouldn't criticize but I didn't really see what the purpose was besides kicking a guy when he's down.
I don't gibe with the attacks on Dave either. However, this was a huge clusterfuck on the part of Userland. Whoever it is that made the decisions to handle the transition, of Dave and his "assets" out of the company, like this deserves to be fired. The huge bungled management of the brand, customer trust, and expectations inherent in this episode is staggering. When you create a loss leader such as this, whether it be free hosting or any of the other free resurces which have built up by other company's to spread their code/services/brand or whatever, you have an obligation to bring it down to a soft landing to avoid alienating your most loyal customers. Any company that doesn't understand this, be it Userland or any other, deserves to be spanked hard. If Dave got in front of this because of his actions then he obviously made some bad decisions as well. But in the end analysis Userland screwed the pooch with this move. It's a pity so much ire has been directed at Dave when the real fault belongs with the company.
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