Here I was out at a live gig watching Lamb give a beautiful performance, and my mind wandered to Verisign and SiteFinder, and particularly to the long-term strategy (or lack of it) that Verisign are showing in their behaviour.

I guess you can make the case that they are chasing the almighty dollar. Well, you can say that, but that is a short term, non-strategic goal. I’m talking about the long-term strategy behind SiteFinder.

So let’s imagine how SiteFinder happened: Somebody inside Verisign decided that capturing the mis-typed urls from .com and .net when people mis-typed in the browser could be used to either re-direct clicks to advertisers or as a way to convince site owners to pay Verisign to ‘capture’ the mis-typed names. Somebody technical in Verisign says (probably sheepishly) that is is possible to do this using wildcards in .com and .net.

Other technical people inside Verisign are bound to have evaluated the other consequences of the changes and realized that it was going to be a fundamental change to the way .com and .net worked and that it wouldpiss people and customers off and hurt Verisign’s name. I’m sure, too that the technical nameserver folk in Verisign would have realized that the nameserver code would be quickly patched to disable SiteFinder.

This change was clearly going to annoy a lot of people that and network and system administrators, as they are going to have to deal with the damage caused by the changes. There have been a few reports on the net that cover the system problems that have occured when the No Such Domain (NXDOMAIN) response is no longer returned for a non-existant domain. And, there have been lots of reports in reductions in the effectiveness of spam filtering, another problem levelled at systems and network administrators.

Systems and Network Administrators also champion adherence to technical standards, so somebody potentially violating a standard is considered bad.

Now, what do systems and network adminstrators buy from Verisign:

  • secure server certificates, for https:// servers
  • domain registrations

Is this change going to encourage them to buy more from Verisign? No. Do they have other places to go for these things? Yes. Is this change going to encourage Trust in Verisign? No. Are there other businesses that can be trusted with server certificates and domain registrations? Yes. Looks like Verisign is a loser here.

I actually thing the trust thing here is pretty important. If your customer’s trust is shattered, then you are going to have to do something pretty special to get it back, especially if there are competitors out there ready to take the customers and sevice them well for less money.

So, it seems like SiteFinder is a great way for Verisign to Bugger Their Own Market.

What went wrong?

I think that there is nobody listening at the top. The experts that do know in the organisation are being ignored while somebody pushes ahead with their ‘clever idea’ . Lots of experts in the organisation know it is going to cause problems, be a failure, but they are either ignored are are fatigued with trying to explain to management just what is happening. This sounds a lot like what NASA has been going through with the Columbia disaster.

In terms of long term strategy: It is better to behave well and support your customers. Think of it in terms of business karma. Be stable and solid and reliable and trustworthy. This will build trust in your organisation and enhance your reputation. Don’t attempt to innovate in areas that will hurt or alienate customers, because this will have a long-term impact on your business. If you alienate your customers, you are going to end up competing on the only thing left, price. Then we have a race to the bottom. Nobody will easily survive this, so best to not do it, eh?