If you are not with tucows for the support, then why bother? I can think of half a dozen cheaper registrars, of course they all offer the same type of commodity services you're upset about.
You need to rethink your business if tucows offering dns service is going to hurt you. I would think if you were so thecnicly adpept, you should be able to wholesale commodity services also.
Best,
~jb
domainwhiz wrote:
On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 12:10, JB wrote:
Forgive me for wading in on this but I can't resist.
Domainwiz, you can get these types of services from almost *ANY* registrar.
Tucows is the leading wholesale registrar, and the major supplier of
wholesale domain name registration services to the domain reseller
community.
I'll admit that when Tucows started offering them I was a little bothered but hey, things change.
The technology barrier is being lowerd, deal with it. Gandi has been offering these very services for on 12.00 per domain name foe a couple of years now.
Customer service, customer service, customer service...
The point is that should my dollars go to support a registrar who is
creating competition for our company and acting in a fashion that will
cause a direct impact to their higher end customers? When you add in
the lack of competitive pricing, and the fact that they gave us all
implied assurances that this wouldn't happen, while trying to placate us
and keep us as customers so they could continue to enjoy our
revenue....someone give me a reason why the better resellers should
consider Tucows. Statistically we have little need for support from
them. I am sure most of the better resellers are about the same.
You obviously feel that you should just go with the flow, and let the
revenue you send Tucows way support these types of movements. That is
your choice, and your right to say you will do that publicly. As it is
mine to say the opposite, and explain why. Tucows will then need to
take the two viewpoints and decide how they will respond. I have no
doubt that they will go ahead with the service offering. Tucows has
shown in the past year that they have changed such that these issues are
no longer important to them. Elliot is good at playing coy when it
suits him, trying to insist that this movement is good for all
resellers. Insisting that if he could just explain it better we'd all
agree with him. That is simply not true. We understand the points he's
making, and we are saying that they simply do not apply in the wide
fashion he wants everyone to believe they do so he can justify the
movement in this direction after doing everything short of specifically
promising they wouldn't when they were told a couple years ago that a
movement like this would mean a departure of major resellers.
Like Paul said in an earlier email, "If I make my services generic, I reduce their relative value." This is why we do not use OpenSRS generic stock scripts, and why we developed our own suite of services, because we were not a "generic" OpenSRS reseller, and that is how we differentiated ourselves, and justified our customers' decisions to choose us for their domain registration business. By making these services "generic" Tucows devalues our business.
You say other registrars offer these services, but they do not have the impact that Tucows offering them will have on the market.
I know they will lose our business over this. I also know from email exchanges asking about what providers we have hedged with that others are considering or have decided the same should Tucows go through with this. They have to decide if they want to go that route with that in mind, and the only way they can know that is if we tell them that, here on the community forum, the primary open channel for discussion.
Can a company who has lost 70% (more?) of their stock value over the
last 2 years since their merger with a publicly traded company really
afford to do that? I guess we will see.
