.net and .org are better, but users always expect (and type in) .com.
Which makes country code TLDs an answer... how? They're not .com either.
Customer retention is like trying to plug all the holes in a sieve, and a bad domain is one more hole. Personally, I'd gladly pay $50/yr for a domain if it meant that suddenly the squatters went out of business.
That said, my gut feeling is that at least a plurality of people are Googling terms like 'basecamp' rather than typing them in as URLs. And I doubt that those who do type in URLs are fickle enough to write off the task on one failure. Proving it either way would be laborious (but would make for interesting research).
Good catch on my phased/fazed mismatch, btw! ;-)
Not true. Spend a few minutes playing with this: http://impossibility.org/
I'm all for abolishing the TLD suffixes totally since (a) they're not used consistently anymore anyway, and (b) it reduces confusion between cases like foo.com and foo.org and foo.net, etc -- unsophisticated users (who are the majority) may assume some or all are the same service or purpose, but they are not. Yes, in a way, in acts to increase demand for a single namespace, but on the other hand, the same sorts of workarounds and naming hacks are still available (add extra words, suffixes, dashes, etc.).
I personally now like fun/weird non-sensical non-specific "made up" names because (a) they're more likely to not already be taken, and (b) they could be used for an almost infinite variety of purposes justifiably. For example: www.spooflurk.com could be for shoes, sex, politics, a CV, a company, a game, a band, whatever, whereas www.shoe-sales.com is rightly expected to be pretty much about selling shoes. Yes you'll get less "organic" traffic (and less accidental traffic, which may sometimes be the same thing) on the other hand I'm a firm believer that the most important thing is to provide something people want, and eventually the right number and mix of people will find out about it anyway, regardless of the name. The noise to signal ratio in the world is pretty bad so quality stands out and people talk.
I'll train it on an English dictionary and they'll sound good as well!
If the name you want is already owned, make contact and negotiate a price. You know, like everybody else in meatspace does with land, trademarks, etc.