At 9/10/01 6:57 PM, David Iyoha wrote:
>Hello kb,
>
>I see your perspective but other registrars that have resellers (i.e. enom)
>already offer those services. And those registrars also have low pricing
>like OpenSrs i.e. ~$10/domain year. Which means as a whole opensrs resellers
>start out at a disadvantage. Which is overall bad for the OpenSrs
>organization which obviously filters down to be bad for their resellers.
>
>To me the idea of limiting OpenSRS to not offering the extra services is
>like closing ones eyes in the face of danger and thinking because you do not
>see it, it is not there.
>
>so ...
>other registrars already offer those services
>then the only people you might have an advantage over in terms of
>differentiation would be some other opensrs resellers
>which boils down to: bringing down your community so you can be better than
>them although the community as a whole is lower in standard than everyone
>else ...
I would strongly disagree. The reason I choose to be an OpenSRS reseller,
instead of eNom or anyone else, is that I am able to control exactly what
I sell, for better or worse.
I have products targeted at a certain market segment that I can excel in.
I don't offer everything to my customers, but I try to offer exactly what
they need. If, instead, OpenSRS were to provide such services, they would
be more "average" in many respects -- in some ways perhaps more
comprehensive after everyone argues to include the kitchen sink, but
probably not exactly what I think my customers want.
I'm sure this is true for many OpenSRS resellers (who may be focused on
totally different market segments than I am). My competitive edge is that
I feel I have a better product than much of the competition, at least in
some respects.
Your message equates differentiation with inability to compete with
others, but just the opposite is true: if I were reselling the exact
same product as other resellers, what particular reason would customers
have to choose me? They might as well choose to buy from eNom reseller
number 745839 who just learned about the Internet last month. They'd get
the exact same product, so why not?
In addition, I control almost the whole end-user experience, with the
customer only minimally interacting with OpenSRS. I want OpenSRS to keep
it that way. If OpenSRS were running e-mail services, or offering
forwarding, how I do business would inevitably be at the mercy of how
OpenSRS does things. While I like OpenSRS, I want them to do their thing
silently and invisibly from the customer's point of view: in order for
customers to perceive my company as being better than other companies,
the customer should be dealing with *my* customer service, *my* servers,
*my* uptime percentage, *my* policies that fit the needs of my market
segment.
I don't want to be an uninvolved reseller who copies and pastes the
marketing materials of some other company, acts as a proxy for their
marketing department, and keeps 20% of the revenue. OpenSRS gives me the
power to be something more, and I hope it stays that way.
While one could argue that OpenSRS could add e-mail and other services as
well as their current services, there are only so many hours in the day,
and that's time that could be better spent improving the existing
services. They already have quite a list of projects that can make them
even more effective at providing silent, reliable service to resellers,
and that list ain't getting any shorter.
The lesson of search engines applies here: all those search engine
companies decided to become portals, and look, they're now all pretty
much the same, giving users no reason to choose one over another (and
about to go bankrupt). Google, on the other hand, decided to do one thing
and do it well -- and I wish I could get my hands on some Google stock.
(I'm going to buy some TUCOWS stock just so I can say, "As a part owner
of the company, I think..." in every message.)
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
