To all: This will be my promised response to Chuck Hatcher's email below. I wanted to use this email as an opportunity to respond to a couple issues and make some points that I think need to be made. I will assume that someone reading this has read http://www.opensrs.org/archives/discuss-list/0211/0439.html (if you haven't bore yourself at your own peril!), accordingly I won't be repeating any of the points made there.
The first matter that I wish to raise is with respect to Chuck's comment that, based upon the responses on this list, it now appears that '(our) focus now seems to be more on "the numbers" and less on the merits'. There are two points I wish to raise here. First, for the first year or so that we were operating OpenSRS this list WAS essentially the only form of communication between us and the resellers. There were the rudiments of support and our first attempts at account management, but essentially the list was it. Today each of account management, product management, marketing, support and compliance have significant interaction with resellers and we capture and share this information where possible (although hoping to keep improving at this). Thus, if the list is the only prism that you view this issue through it may appear that way, but to us it is not. Also, and probably more importantly, to me the numbers and the merits should rarely if ever diverge. In the short term there may be advantages to be gained by making decisions that are somehow "wrong" (against the "merits") but never in the long term. We (you and I) may not always agree on whether something is "on the merits", but we can agree that we will always try and make decisions on that basis. Next Chuck says "the link between customers and management has grown weaker". In my view it the lines of communication have grown stronger. We have a number of means of communicating and validating our views. We are able to roll out new code for bugs and features every seven weeks (and this does not include new services or ccTLDs, etc.) and we have much better processes for managing change. We are far from satisfied here and specifically we need to do a better job of communicating our roadmap, but we are certainly improving and hoping to continue to. Chuck next uses the referral list as an example of this. What is ironic here is that what makes the issue of dealing with the referral list on discuss list difficult is the fact that the organization has matured. The difficulty of just saying "we will deal with it in this way" is that it touches many depts (sales, marketing, product management and then dev and the whole qa/mis/ops process) which work together and no one manager wants to bind the others without talking. I am the only one who could do that and I never would. It is a horrible way to treat employees and if I did that regularly we would be unable to keep good people. Everyone here is very aware of this issue and we will have substantive comments on it in the near future. Until then, PLEASE feel free to keep raising it, complaining about it and jumping on our heads in general just please don't feel we are ignoring your comments. Again, we may not always agree but the comments are never ignored. Now, Chuck, you then jump to the Verisign SMP program which, IMHO, has absolutely nothing to do with the issues being discussed and you use it to "prove" the above-noted points. I find the argument flawed. AFAIK, no one other than you, OF OUR THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS, has been asking about this. Now there may indeed have been some that I am not aware of, but not nearly in any volume. Chuck, the easiest kind of service for us to roll out is one offered by VGRS. These are virtually plug-and-play. We would love it if some/many/most of our customers appeared to want this, but to date that is not the information. The issue of SMP is a broad one and I don't want to go deep on it in this email until I have had the chance to debrief in full with the product management folks, but remember SMP and most any other secondary market solution needs near ubiquity to be important. To date that does not appear to be the case anywhere. We are talking to VGRS and are considering SMP, but.......... Next, I don't agree AT ALL that "the core function of a registrar is to provide registry products efficiently". First, this is very business model dependant. For us, for example, renewal functionality is extremely important as is tranfer functionality yet these are the furthest things from "registry products" (in fact today the registry, at least VGRS, makes them quite difficult). We simplify business processes. We help manage and manipulate data. These are our core functions. Happy to go deeper here if you disagree. WLS IS "another Verisign travesty of fair trade", but if you guys want it, we will provide it happily. Lastly, thanks for taking the time to write such a long, thoughtful email. Thanks for being a customer for so long (and I hope for much longer). Thanks for giving me an opportunity to say some things I have been wanting to say. Today is the 3rd birthday of OpenSRS (born January 12, 2000) so to all of you I raise a glass tonight. Thanks to all of you for allowing us to do what we do. We hope, I hope, that you always care enough about this and about us to raise these issues. Regards Elliot Noss ======================================================== Chuck Hatcher: I have been an OpenSRS reseller and a member of this list since April 2000. Although domain name registration is not my primary business, it continues to be an important part of my overall plan. My account has brought 4,931 domain-years of business to Tucows so far. Those of us who have been here for awhile can recall dozens of reseller issues that have come up, arguments pro and con, statements by Tucows addressing the problems, and eventually a resolution. If you look back at the responses in the early days and compare them to those of more recent times, you can't help but get a sense of a change in attitude at Tucows. The focus now seems to be more on "the numbers" and less on the merits. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a capitalist through and through. The job of every business is to be profitable, and you cannot ignore the numbers. But there is a difference between observing good results from focusing on customer needs, and focusing only on the results. The earlier approach at Tucows seemed to be to provide what customers asked for, to do business in a fair manner, and to listen to constructive criticism. The approach was successful, at least from the measure of the number of domain names registered. But as seems inevitable as companies grow, the link between customers and management has grown weaker. I have stayed with Tucows as my primary registrar even though other registrars continue to offer more attractive pricing. (My effective wholesale price at OpenSRS is actually higher today than it was in the early days when there were rebates.) I made this decision consciously based on my experience with Tucows, my concern that a registrar needs to make a certain amount of money to stay in business for the long term, and the overall "good feeling" I had from being an OpenSRS reseller. But the domain name business is in a constant state of flux, and each of us must constantly re-evaluate our supplier relationships. The big question for me is whether or not Tucows actually wants to keep my business. And if they do, how are they showing it? The referral list has been discussed periodically over the past couple of years. The list itself is not an issue for me - I don't want to be on the list because I don't actively market a retail registration business. But seeing how Tucows responds to other "little guys" who do want to be listed is very important to me. It's hard to find any indication that Tucows is actively trying to promote the small reseller. I would think anything they could do to help the little guy to become more successful would be good for their business. (I would also think the biggest resellers are the more likely candidates to become accredited registrars and leave the fold.) Recently I brought up Verisign's upcoming Secondary Market Program, looking for a committment from Tucows that it would be offerred through OpenSRS resellers. I may be alone in my opinion that SMP will be a major factor in choosing a registrar in the year to come, but the fact is that it is a wholesale registry product, and the business of registrars is to supply registry products to their customers. I felt the choice to not provide the service could be a costly one for Tucows, but in a private email a Tucows representative told me, "...we do not have the resellers that would leave us over not offering this product, and if the clients we do have in this industry do leave, there would be little to no impact to our operations whatsoever..." Would the "old Tucows" have responded in this manner? I realize a lot of Tucows' success can be attributed to Network Solutions' disastrous business practices. OpenSRS was started at the right time with the right message to catch a large part of the mass exodus from NSI. And it has been fashionable to trash NSI and Verisign, which has led to an automatic disdain for anything coming from Verisign. But like it or not, Verisign is the com/net registry, and every .com and .net domain name registered or renewed is the sale of a Verisign product. The registrar is selling a commodity item. Sure, there are things that differentiate OpenSRS from NSI, Register.com, and the over 100 other registrars that now exist. But the core function of a registrar is to provide registry products efficiently. And when a registrar decides not to offer a new registry product, they force their customers to go elsewhere to buy that product. It is hard to understand a registrar willingly sending their customers to other registrars. It comes off as arrogant to say, "If you need that, then we don't need you." Now it appears as though WLS is coming. Will Tucows condemn WLS as another Verisign travesty of fair trade, or embrace it as a new product some customers may actually want to purchase? Tucows, now with a stock price of 23 cents and a market cap of under 15 million, has become the number two registrar in terms of com/net/org registrations in less than three years. That's a fantastic achievement. It would be easy to think, based on that success, that everything is rosy and future success is assured. Complacency is dangerous, and things happen fast in the domain name business. I hope someone at Tucows is watching the trends, looking ahead at the winds of change, and making plans for continued success in the future. I know I am.
