Elliot, I appreciate your willingness to respond to the list. I wish I could say your response adequately addressed my concerns.
>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. "...but to us it is not." To US? So if YOU don't have a problem with communication with resellers, then there must not be a problem? > 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. "...we can agree that we will always try.." Actions speak louder than words. I have been told at least a dozen times since last Friday that "Tucows cares about every reseller." This is very easy to say. But saying it means very little. It is your action on which you will be judged. Good communications does not mean soothing ruffled feathers. > Next Chuck says "the link between customers and management has grown > weaker". In my view it the lines of communication have grown stronger. Yes, I believe that in your view they have. In fact, I believe that some of your customers have a better experience than others in this regard. After having received a number of private responses, I now think your internal communications may be a bigger problem than (or perhaps the root cause of) any problems communicating with your customers. > 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. How long does it take to get all your ducks in a row and make a public statement? This is not a new concern. Many more people read the list than actively post to it. There are many waiting for a response, even if it is bad news for some. > 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. I only brought up SMP because it was in regard to SMP that I was told that a small number of resellers leaving Tucows would not affect the bottom line. I thought this was a prime example of the "numbers mentality". I have been made painfully aware that I am (currently) in the minority when it comes to my opinion about SMP, and I would have been satisfied from day one if someone had just told me Tucows will not be offering SMP because nobody but me wants it. > Chuck, the easiest kind of service for us to roll out is one > offered by VGRS. These are virtually plug-and-play. I would think offering SMP through resellers would be a major challenge, and far from plug-and-play. That's why I tried to bring up the topic early on instead of waiting until it was live. Playing catch-up could be costly. > remember SMP and most any other secondary market > solution needs near ubiquity to be important. Is it a chicken, or an egg? It sounds like Tucows is waiting to see how successful the product is before committing to it. I don't want to debate the merits of SMP, because it really wasn't the point of my post. (Maybe this is a case of "not invented here" syndrome.) > 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). I consider a domain name to be a registry product. Registrations, renewals, and transfers are at the heart of what a registrar does. Tucows may be more than just a registrar, but these are core functions. Let's not get bogged down in semantics. My point was that registrars provide registry products that cannot be obtained by non-registrars. If a registrar chooses not to offer a registry product that its customer needs, that customer must become the customer of another registrar. I question the wisdom of making decisions that force customers to leave. > 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. I wrote a "long, thoughtful email" not because I am bored, or because I wanted to bash Tucows, or because my inbox was empty. I wrote it out of sincere frustration. I am no less frustrated now than I was before, but at least I am more confident that I have the facts I need to make an intelligent business decision moving forward. > 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. Congratulations to OpenSRS on its first three years. May the next three be even better! And may the growth of Tucows not affect its ability to see clearly, move with agility, and serve its customers and shareholders with integrity.
