Radio Community Server:  D-I-Y

Dave Winer of Userland, www.userland.com, is a player.  He’s a software developer who believes passionately that the best software comes from small companies with little or no bureaucracy, lots of hands-on contact with customers and other developers, and a real passion for creating great stuff. 

That often leaves him frustrated with a marketplace that seemingly rewards what he likes to refer to as BigCo’s with their never-ending need for revenue growth and their bottomless pockets to promote their proprietary and/or big and expensive products.

Dave dreams big dreams and one of them has been to let developers and users have easy access to the web, publishing their own content, controlling it in a very hands-on way.  Sometimes Dave refers to this as D-I-Y (Do It Yourself).  If you’ve ever looked at out-of-date or incorrect information on your own web site and realized that you’re going to have to send a note to a web master and then wait for someone else to schedule the update, you know why D-I-Y just might be better.

On March 18, 2002 Dave started shipping a product that might just turn some heads.  His Radio Community Server (RCS) http://rcs.userland.com/  is designed to let anyone, but particularly groups of users, private groups inside corporate firewalls, or public groups outside, on the web, create their own communities where they can communicate via weblog technology and share ideas.

RCS has a desktop-centric point of view, rather than the web server-centric point of view of some earlier products.  Such products attempt to exploit the power of today’s powerful PC’s and give users more control of their data.  Their proponents often note that in the web server model, users may run their browsers from a 1+ Gigabyte PC, but they’re often using it as a very classy terminal.

RCS runs on top of Userland’s Radio or Frontier technologies.  Here’s the exciting part.  RCS is FREE.  Winer has decided that the correct price is zero since he knows that as its use grows, he’ll be selling copies of Radio (at $39.95 a desktop) or Frontier (at $899 per server) and that’s where he’ll hope to make his revenue. 

Opinions readers know that I believe Pricing is often Positioning.  By Pricing RCS in this attention-getting and seductive way, Dave Winer is insuring that he will get a lot of attention.  Frankly, he usually can get that anyway. His weblog, Scripting News Update at www.scripting.com, is one of the most popular on the web.  Put “Dave” into the Google search engine and his name is likely to come up first. 

But even someone with lots of web bandwidth and a great reputation finds it difficult to compete for attention in the marketplace.  Radio, Frontier, and RCS all are built on the open standards that many web developers and users prefer, while other desktop-centric information sharing products like Groove, www.groove.net, and Microsoft’s Hailstorm (Microsoft My Services, http://www.microsoft.com/myservices/), both of which contain some proprietary elements.

Winer hopes to replicate the guerilla marketing successes  of PC’s themselves and of applications like Visicalc, seeding the product into the hands of users who need and like the results RCS can deliver and hoping that enthusiasm and word-of-mouth will do the rest.  We suspect that the word-of-web may help, too.      

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