Hi Ken,
"Ken Schafer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We have NINE THOUSAND resellers and maybe 20 or 30 active contributors
to this list. The other lists we run are completely dormant.
You folks are completely passionate about this way of communicating, I
get that. But we can't base our community strategy on something that
works for such a small portion of our resellers.
20 or 30 posting, but how many reading? How many who use this mailing
list, this community to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry? I
bet there are thousands.
This list is read by those who tend to be well informed and well regarded
in their companies and their industries, who make recommendations that
others follow. We are the Mavens described in The Tipping Point, that tiny
segment of your market who are passionate and knowledgeable enough about
your product, and your industry to set trends, to move markets and to
change directions.
Hosting this list after internic gave it up put Tucows in a unique position
to be big part of the dialogue and the debate and the future of how domains
would work in the post-monopoly market. Early on, Tucows was a huge factor
in that market, the one to watch.
Now? You don't even realize that the world is still watching, shaking their
heads as you too, shut down the list, not understanding...
We have to try other things.
How about... lowering your prices to be competitive, open-sourcing your
perl API, and running the software project like an open source project,
allowing others to contribute? The "Open" in OpenSRS is what drew me to
you, and the *almost* openness of your service offerings has always
tantalized us, (us being the army of open source developers whose companies
and clients all need and don't understand the domain registration system,
and who wanted (and still want) to direct our code, and community
discussion, and customers' business contributions to the least-evil,
lowest-possible-cost registrar that we can interface with using nothing but
our all-free open source software stack, and mutt (the best (because its
still text-based, mind you) mail reader).
While you might not believe it we DID think long and hard about the
needs of the folks that like email.
Thinking amongst yourselves, there in your conference room, where there is
exactly zero danger of learning something you don't already know, having an
idea you haven't already had, or being forced to consider a point of view
other than your own, is not always the best place way make decisions (at
least not about important things, like why your market share and stock
price are already infinitesimal and continually shrinking).
The compromise we came up with was people can get notifications about
new posts to threads they are interested in but they'll have to click a
link to reply instead of hitting Reply All.
See there you go. You can't click a link in mutt. Not everyone allows
HTML emails past their mail server, much less in their inbox. These are
just a couple of examples of things you can't learn without venturing, at
least virtually, outside of your corporate lair.
Did I just say lair?
To me that is not an outrageous compromise. I'm sorry that some people
are very unhappy about that compromise and I understand that some people
feel so strongly about it that they'll forego further interactions with
the OpenSRS Reseller community.
Will you be counting the number of customers who stop participating in the
community, how many fewer readers will ever visit the forum, (much less
click on every post) than those scanned the subject line, at least, of
every post posted to this mailing list? Will you correlate that with the
number of customers you lose? No of course not. I suspect your livelihood
depends on carefully and accurately measuring exactly not that.
I personally think that is a shame and hope that many will reconsider -
or at least give the Forum a fair shot by trying it for a month or so
before deciding it's evil.
Why must I as a customer reconsider how I choose to contribute my
participation in your community? I personally think its a shame that
Tucows values this community so little, and underestimates its importance
so much that they would suddenly and simply pull the rug out from under it
and, of all things, defend that as progress.
We are passionate about serving our resellers. We believe so much in
being reseller-friendly that we put that phrase right in our new logo.
Whew! Well, there ya go! That helped!
Now that your branding is on-message, how about following through with, you
know, action? Decisions? That demonstrate less reseller-hostility than,
you know, unilaterally discontinuing the oldest and finest community of
domain name resellers in the history of domain name reselling? How bout
upgrading this mailing list instead to an open professional association of
domain industry experts, sponsored by Tucows to foster common sense and
open discussion about the abuses that still go on by those big evil
competitors of yours... ah never mind. You guys just don't get it that
this community was ours before it was yours.
I'm just waiting for that Godaddy guy to post here and announce that he's
running the new domain discuss list and we're all invited to come on over
there and continue the unending debate, check out his new GPL API, low-low
prices and revised mission statement (to do no (more) evil).
Do we get it right every time? No.
Well said!
-dave
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