GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar in the world, and that makes the company founded by Bob Parsons a T-Rex of the industry.
Dinosaurs became extinct eventually, after a suffocating fallout of debris blanketed earth for a few millennia, following some cosmic collision. At the time, the dinos thought they were “hot shit.”
This time around, GoDaddy is displaying the same amount of corporate hubris, by refusing to make improvements to its user base experience.
Changing the interface and removing sexist Super Bowl commercials along with the “daddy” from the logo, are merely cosmetic improvements of the brand.
What customers want is a functionality upgrade, preferably one that establishes transparency and eliminates glitches during domain auctions.
GoDaddy domain aftermarket VP, Paul Nicks, tweeted that GoDaddy has no plans to add “custom handles” to its domain auctions.
So if you were looking for meaningful usernames like at NameJet and DropCatch, good luck with that; you’re stuck in numeric ID hell for the next few releases of the GoDaddy OS.
But surely, such an addition of an extra database table linking these long numbers to meaningful, memorable usernames should not be a problem in 2019. It wasn’t a problem in 1999 when I was programming the same features in ColdFusion, and new programming disciplines along with API availability makes this task a cinch twenty years later.
GoDaddy wants to remain a domain industry T-Rex with a mammoth’s brain – until the next Big Bang comes along. Transparency, ease of bidding, and plain simple enjoyment of competitive domain auctions seem to not matter to its middle management.
But these things matter to domain investors spending money on the GoDaddy marketplace.
GoDaddy resembles a T-Rex – Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
