At 3/23/01 9:11 PM, Elliot Noss wrote:
>I think the best I can tell you Robert is for the right offer we would sell
>Domain Direct happily. Our commitment is to the wholesale business and, as
>mentioned previously, the Opera deal is, in essence a wholesale deal.
Sure; I don't fault you guys for making a buck. I'd probably do the same
thing in your place. It's just that occasionally the buck you're making
is coming at my expense.
The fact you're charging them a special low price doesn't alter the fact
that people clicking on that button are being directed to buy a Tucows
domain name without being sent to an OpenSRS reseller, thus depriving me
of a potential sale. Because of that, you guys DID make a choice here to
compete with your resellers -- or at least to emphasize one reseller over
another.
Perhaps you could claim that you'd promote a certain reseller in exchange
for consideration, even if you didn't own that reseller. Fair enough,
except that in this case Domain Direct's internal access was presumably
what let them get the deal; I didn't hear it being discussed as a
possibility around *my* office water cooler, for example.
There will always be situations where Tucows, being a content company
with clout, is in a position to send some business to a retail domain
name seller. And, surprise, when they do it, it's usually their own
company's retail channel they send it to, if for no other reason than
they happen to have lunch with you sometimes and I don't. Influence buys
power.
On the other hand, Tucows did invite me for lunch next month... hey, now
I get it. I'm gonna make a deal and be rich!
>For those of you who have a really nice set of end-user tools and features,
>are able to create your environment out of relatively simple templates, and
>are able to provide a bit of customer service, there are great opportunities
>out there.
Yeah, I've got that goin' on. As I said, I like OpenSRS.
I still wish I wasn't competing with you guys, mostly for psychological
reasons.
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
