Interesting thread. There are a few points that I want to make here. I note
they are general, not only responding to this post.
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. It is also the case that virtually
every wholesale competitor of ours offers these services such that us
offering them will not limit their availability (although I appreciate your
perception of our market power).
I would bet that the true differentiation of your business is trust,
reliability and reputation. If you asked your customers "why do you use
Tiger Tech" I would bet that the answer would be "oh that Robert is a good
guy" or "they always help me when I have problems" or "their systems are
very reliable". I doubt it would be "their domain forwarding is awesome".
Next, it is very possible that you can "run these services better at a lower
cost with a better interface". Our customers are an amazingly heterogenous
group. It will NEVER be the case that we can introduce a service that
everyone will want. This is the nature of a diverse customer group. You are
right that email and DNS are at opposite ends of the spectrum. One (email)
is a service that we think is in the midst of fundamental change and that
the whole industry is missing the opportunity on. The others (forwarding(s),
DNS) are little bits of enabling technology that we may need to introduce
for competitive reasons (most competitors offer them) and to facilitate
email (DNS).
The most important point that I take away from this thread is that I haven't
done a good enough job of describing what I mean by "innovating at the
edge". I have written a number of times in the past about the smart service
provider focusing on customer service and customer acquisition as core
competencies. Some of you have played that back as "we would just be direct
marketers and answering phones in support" and not doing anything technical.
Let me unpack it a bit.
Customer service. Do you know why your customers are calling you? What the
top ten reasons are every month? Do you create new faq items monthly to
address these issues? Do you push new self-help tools to your customers
quarterly to address these issues? I could go deeper and deeper, but these
are ALL technical issues and are all, IMHO, examples of winning
differentiation.
Customer Acquisition. Do you track where your new customers come from? Do
you sell using features or benefits (this is a whole discussion in itself as
I think our WHOLE industry is way off the mark here)? Do you have one of
those wanky feature tables that look like you are selling a database or a
computer not a service? Are you selling hosting and giving away email, or
put differently, are you selling what 10% of the market wants and giving
away what 100% of the market wants? I could give you ten more questions on
Google/Overture alone. The person who loves technical challenges, who sees
their differentiating strength as technical, should recognize that technical
solutions play an important part in all of these issues.
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. I think the way you beat
them all is by offering better support and services that are easier to use.
Comments welcome of course.
Regards
Elliot Noss
Tucows inc.
416-538-5494
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-discuss-list@opensrs.org
> [mailto:owner-discuss-list@opensrs.org]On Behalf Of Robert L Mathews
> Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 2:20 AM
> To: discuss-list@opensrs.org
> Subject: Re: Tucows survey
>
>
> 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 Technologies
>
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
>
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