At 6/4/03 2:07 PM, Elliot Noss wrote: >First, in my view you cannot truly differentiate a business with something >(any of the forwardings) that thousands, probably tens of thousands of >people offer and more offer than don't.
I have to say I disagree here; I think this industry has not even gotten close to offering people reliable basic services that are easy to use. Put bluntly, those tens of thousands of competing services almost all suck; they're unreliable and difficult to use, and there is money is to be made by offering superior implementations. That's where my time is going. >I just want you guys to win. To beat the AOLs, the RBOCs and the PTTs. I >also want you to beat GoDaddy and eNom resellers. Right. However, my goal is also to beat other Tucows resellers, which is the point where our interests (quite naturally) diverge. I would offer fundamental ISP services, too, in your position -- I think it's inevitable, and it doesn't bother me much. But I do understand why some people are upset. When Tucows only offered services that small-to-medium ISPs could not offer, you were adding a new revenue stream for every one of your customers. The domain registration revenue Tucows resellers started collecting in 2000 came almost exclusively at the expense of bigger companies like NSI; it didn't take much money away from the small-to-medium ISPs who are your reseller market. In contrast, allowing new resellers to provide (say) e-mail service, even if they do not have the technical expertise that would normally be required to do so, DOES potentially take money away from other OpenSRS resellers who were selling these services before OpenSRS came along. There is a difference to resellers, even if it's mostly psychological. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies "A professional in an ape mask is still a professional." -Marge Simpson
