GoDaddy is the armpit of the tech industry. It preys on uneducated users (generally "business" people), sells with sex, and offers mediocre products at best - and even that is quite liberal. It just goes to show you how important marketing is.
Everyone knows that GoDaddy isn't a great company (including the small business owners that use them); it's interesting that they don't have a strong direct competitor. There are many registrars, but none that have nearly the level of traction that GoDaddy has.
Seems like an opportunity for some company to be the Zappos / Southwest / Amazon of domain registration - easy to use, no-frills, low-cost, excellent customer service. I wonder why that company isn't out there yet.
Everyone knows that GoDaddy isn't a great company (including the small business owners that use them)
I have had previous employers force me to move us off of GMail to GoDaddy email because they thought "Gmail sucks".
People also continue to host with GoDaddy (which I do not believe to be in order to save $10-$15 per month) even after I have showed them better alternatives from a performance aspect.
I agree with you that there is an opportunity in the market but as I stated in my original post I think GoDaddy preys on the uneducated who believe the most popular/largest ad budget is certainly the best option.
It's probably a futile exercise in semantics, but I believe that there is a difference between opining that GoDaddy is the best option currently available and thinking they're a great company.
Does anyone else think Google would be a good company to make a play for this space? They have the right consumer facing brand to offer this type of product.
That was a conclusion I came to as well, however, with that aside, they could build the tech in a way that can be more easily understood and consumed by the masses.
The $15 includes free whois privacy. For GoDaddy that's an extra 7 or 8 dollars (last time I checked) on top of their 11.99 domain cost. Hover also has excellent customer service and 0 upsell. I'm sure you can find cheaper registrants out there but Hover is the very definition of a customer focused company.
How important marketing is in a marketplace that's relatively standardized. A domain name is a domain name, no matter where it is bought (relatively so), making marketing your company crucially important.
If you isolate GoDaddy as a domain registrar then I would be likely to agree. However, I have been forced to work with hundreds of people that use GoDaddy hosting for instance which is certainly not standardized. GoDaddy has thousands of products - just try buying a domain and see how much upsell there is.
I would argue that the marketplace isn't well standardized, but rather that some information information (eg. on practices related to domain transfer and takedown) is unavailable to or ignored by most of the consumers in the market, causing the observed irrationality that results in GoDaddy remaining solvent.
