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Something that always stuck with me is I remember reading in a book about the internet long ago about how innovative the name Amazon.com was and how it was the
by JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Something that always stuck with me is I remember reading in a book about the internet long ago about how innovative the name Amazon.com was and how it was the future of internet business. It said it needs to be more memorable. You aren’t going to buy your books on Books.com you are going to use Amazon. Turned out to be very right. And this was in the pets.com era. Everyone thought you needed the most generic name possible and that if you got something like books.com or travel.com you had cornered the market on it.
- oblio 6y agoIt depends. facebook.com or messenger.com aren't super memorable. Microsoft also made it work by adding something else next to the name. Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Access.
- oconnor663 6y agoFwiw, a "face book" is a thing you would get at Harvard (and Yale and presumably lots of other schools too but I'm not sure), kind of like a yearbook but at the start of freshman year instead of the end. So for the earliest thefacebook.com users, the name was actually familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoIts a thing in all US high schools - so for US searchers it would be very obvious Back in the 70's in the UK one of our American teachers mentioned then in our general studies class when we where doing America one term - she refused to show us her entry :-)
- infermore 6y agoIt's definitely not a thing in all US high schools. I'm pretty sure yearbooks are the thing most US high schools have.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoMight be regional our American English Teacher was from the posh east cost and a "facebook" was what she called it.
- astura 6y agoNo, definitely not a thing at "all US high schools." I can believe it's a thing at really posh high schools though.
- powersnail 6y agoI feel that the importance of optimizing brand name is over-hyped. A lot of it is retrospective reasoning, arguing why such name is good for popularity after the brand becomes popular.
- skynet-9000 6y agoI don't know, I was going to start an auction site with the memorable name "eBay", but then someone beat me to it. (Counterpoint: it is pretty short and pronounceable..)
- laurent92 6y agoLegend says Steve Jobs told his two cofounders, who were scratching their heads over an innovative name, that if they didn’t find a name within 24hrs he would incorporate as Apple. Which is good enough and no reason to hold up the whole process for a decent name.
- 908B64B197 6y agoIt's also in front of Atari in the phonebook.
- tdeck 6y agoI just ran across this talk where Jobs basically makes that claim: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg He says it was also because he liked apples, and it was ahead of Atari in the phone book.
- ourcat 6y agoAlso Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" at the time became so popular due to the word 'Internet' compared to a 'Netscape'. So many non-technical people just thought that was the 'way in' when they bought their first PC.
- eigenvalue 6y agoIs that the real reason? Being bundled with the OS as the default browser for 95% of all computers seems like a bigger driver!
- eyelidlessness 6y agoNeither of those are the reason, speaking from experience both as a family tech support and as a web dev. It’s because everyone recognized the big “e” icon. My brother got my dad a Mac and he already knew the main browser was Safari, but he still called me (knowing I had used Macs for years longer) and just asked: 1. What the hell is Safari (no kidding he didn’t even say hello). 2. Can I use the Internet Explorer? Edge now (correctly) accounts for this by... having a big “e”-looking icon and basically otherwise being a skin over Chromium.
- mrunkel 6y agoI think you're confusing cause and effect here. Yes, the `e` became synonymous with the Internet for a lot of users, but that's only because of the two reasons listed. Not the other way around.
- goto11 6y agoInternet Explorer became popular because it was bundled with Windows.
- slowmovintarget 6y agoAt the time, IE was also dramatically faster than Netscape Navigator, because it wasn't just bundled, it was built in.
- ryantgtg 6y agoPlus, wasn’t the default Android sms/mms client once called Messenger? So, not only not memorable, but also confusingly generic.
- varenc 6y agoFacebook was founded a decade after Amazon. 2004 vs 1994. Google was already dominate and it IPO’d the same year. They’re both old at this point but Amazon is in a whole different class of “early internet”.
- kevstev 6y agoI think you are leaving out a really important aspect of the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. If you were looking for something about Pets until google became dominant, you were just as likely, if not more likely, to type pets.com into your browser as you were to go to a search engine. Getting the initial traffic to your site was really hard in those days, the domain was really important for that.
- oarsinsync 6y agoTo that end, it's worth reading up on the history of sex.com. The domain historically (and currently?) generates tonnes of revenue through advertising, and has been hijacked more than once.
- TMWNN 6y agoI wonder if it's because people are likely to try `sex.com` in a web browser for laughs (and get surprised when it turns out to be a real site), but aren't likely to do so with `books.com` or `travel.com`.
- toyg 6y agoYou have too much trust in people's wholesomeness. We all know the internet is for pr0n ("...so grab your d##k and double-click...").
- Quarrelsome 6y agothere used to be (sadly not anymore) a very active forum on fuckyou.com and it was mostly populated by people that had just randomly typed it in one day.
- codezero 6y agoThis is somewhat second hand but I worked with someone who claimed to know the person who owned sex.com (he was trying to buy it from him at the time, and I'm trying to be deliberately un-assertive) in the mid 90s (also fair warning, this was a long time ago and I probably misremember stuff) and said he paid a ton of money in bribes to the search engines/portals back then - which was what most people assumed, but those companies insisted wasn't true, so it fit a narrative people liked. I don't think sex.com was an expected direct hit back then - and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right - there wasn't a ton of convenience and most browsers relied on a heavy set of built-in bookmarks to get people into portals and search engines. That said, I believe it was totally true that they likely paid six or seven figures for a year or longer deal to guarantee top three for a ton of porn search terms. I assume that area was allowed to be seedy in order to mitigate risk of even allowing that content to be included in the first place, and companies didn't feel bad getting money from porn sites who had a lot to throw around.
- MisterTea 6y agoThe irony is domains like books.com sounded like a sure winner but that only works for books. How would Jeff be doing today if he ran books.com and just sold ... books. bookswebservice (BWS) doesn't have that same ring to it.
- treis 6y agoIn retrospect the idea of selling everything online was the first great idea. Even if it was a bit of rehash of Sears I think they were the only one that had that vision. Second great idea was free 2 day shipping with Prime. Great for their cash flow and customer retention. Third great idea was AWS. Still TBD are advertising and the marketplace. They make a lot of money but at the long term risk of customer satisfaction. Also TBD are the media plays (Twitch, video,music,.etc.). Not clear if they will ever make money.
- laurent92 6y agoThe media part could be about owning the consumer, even at a loss, or owning the providers, or preventing Google from approaching the user login market to tight, etc.
- wyclif 6y agoWe are firing on all cylinders And yet, reviews are still horribly broken and have been for years. Also counterfeit products and books are everywhere on the site. Amazon is going to have to fix those hugely important things before I'll buy the Kool-Aid that they're "firing on all cylinders", which is just CEO pep talk.
- bryanmgreen 6y agoSpeaking as someone who works for a company called "BoardGameTables.com", we really like our obvious name. Nothing wrong with something broad. We sell more than board game tables, but everything is connected and it gets us a lot of traffic and search juice. With SEO getting so much money and attention dumped into it, the usefulness has kind of come back around for a name like this.
- purple_ferret 6y agoExcept Yahoo was already one of the biggest names on the internet and it was a head scratcher to everyone I knew on first hear.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI wonder if the browsers themselves weren't responsible for the reversal of this trend. Back in the day, if you typed something into address bar, there wasn't a "fallback to search" like we have today.
- bbarnett 6y agoWell, some older browsers would try slapping .com at the end, and adding www at the start too, if no domain was found... So just typing sex could be fruitful...
- II2II 6y agoI wonder how much that was linked to trust? People were leery about online shopping in the beginning, and a name like books.com sounds a little too generic.
- ma2rten 6y agoIt seems like amazon was started around the same time as lycos, yahoo, altavista. Pets.com was started 3 years later.
- vmception 6y agoPeople still think you need the most generic name possible, they just don't understand that the reason QuantumSpiritualCrystals.com was still available is that it wasn't generic.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI'm pretty sure Books.com is just as memorable as Amazon.com, what matters is the execution.
- einpoklum 6y agoI don't know about you, but I would go by books at books.com - or rather, I would if I were in the US. By the way, books.com redirects to barnesandnoble.com
- standardUser 6y agoI've always hated the name, though I obviously can't argue against its efficacy. The Amazon river and rainforest are symbolically and literally among the most significant features of our natural world. Now, it's better known as the name of a company that can send us every kind of new junk to replace our old junk.
- littlecranky67 6y agoOne often overlooked fact is that fixed-price book policy of a lot of countries (like here in Germany where we have it to this day) helped amazon a lot. Books have a margin of around 30% and - by law - you must sell them at a fixed price which is the same in every bookstore in the country. That allowed Amazon to offer free shipping, as the resulting margin was still high enough. And since you as a consumer have to pay the same price for a book no matter where you buy it anyways, it became a lot easier to just order a book online instead of driving to a bookstore to collect it (oftentimes the shop had to order them anyways and you had to come back a day later to pick it up). Once Amazon was a serious player in the book business with existing logistics, payment etc. it was an easy move for them to expand to other products.
- OrbitRock 6y agoAnd nowadays if you’re trying to search something related to the Amazon rainforest Amazon.com stuff comes up first...
- spoonjim 6y agoI don’t think naming actually matters. In retrospect it seems important. But names as bland as Facebook and as zany as Yahoo! and as creepy as Tungle.Me have all succeeded.