At 6/3/03 8:22 PM, WebWiz wrote:
>C'mon, do you really differentiate yourself by how well your
>DNS runs, or the spiffy DNS control panel you offer your
>customers?
Hmmm? This is exactly the kind of thing I differentiate my company on:
core services that are run more competently than the competition, while
making them easy for end-users to understand. That's all 90% of customers
want.
What kind of crazy stuff are you trying to sell out there on the edges?
:-)
Seriously, when I see people on the list saying that services like e-mail
and DNS are (or will soon be) commodities, and suggesting that resellers
concentrate on emerging technologies, I sometimes wonder if you guys are
on the same Internet I'm on. A huge number of companies in this industry
do not have a firm grip on the basics, and customers are desperate to
deal with someone who can just make their e-mail work reliably.
I also see two contradictory arguments being made in favor of outsourcing
DNS and e-mail: the first is that this is such a simple service that
resellers shouldn't even need to bother with it, and the other is that
it's hard to get right so you should let someone else do it. Those
arguments are targeted at resellers at the far opposite ends of the
spectrum; they certainly aren't targeted at me (I think the first
argument is just plain wrong, and I reject the second because, frankly, I
think I can run these services better at a lower cost with a better
interface, at least for my particular customers -- even if that's just
misplaced pride, I expect many here feel that way).
>From where I sit, I don't see anything new here, nor does
>it appear to me that Tucows is doing anything that they
>haven't clearly articulated that they would do.
Actually, Tucows once explicitly stated they saw their role as only
providing services that were *impossible* for small-to-medium ISPs to
create themselves. For example, most small-to-medium ISPs do not have the
resources to become registrars or certificate authorities, so Tucows
aggregates the power of many resellers and makes them (almost) as
powerful as a registrar or certificate authority. That was a great idea;
I had hoped they would apply the same process to similar issues, such as
credit card payment gateways.
Tucows has instead apparently decided to offer many of the fundamental
services of an ISP, selling via an affiliate network who do not handle
any of the technical parts, which does not sit quite so well with me.
True, Tucows is not "directly competing" with their resellers by branding
it as "Tucows ISP", but that's just a matter of semantics: they are
entirely running the technical side of services such as e-mail, and the
fact that they let resellers collect the money and handle the support
doesn't make a huge difference as far as I'm concerned. The end result is
more competition, which is the same thing that would occur if Tucows sold
the services directly to end users.
Of course, that's not the end of the world. A few more incompetent
resellers that don't understand the complexities of DNS, etc., won't kill
my business -- in fact, it'll probably help in the long run (just what I
need, of course; God knows I already spend enough time helping new
customers extract themselves from hosting companies that couldn't
competently operate a turn signal, let alone a DNS server). And I agree
with your point that most (if not all) other registrars do compete
directly with their resellers, so even if one were to ascribe the most
nefarious motives to Tucows, they wouldn't be doing anything the others
aren't.
Still, the thought that nags in the back of my head is that if I'm going
to be doing business with a company that competes with me, there are lots
of choices for domain name registrars that meet that description. Tucows
has effectively eliminated one of the reasons for competent ISPs to
choose them, which may or may not be a smart thing to do.
-- Robert L Mathews, Tiger TechnologiesA: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:37:44 EDT