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My employer did some work early in Dotcom for a company that owned the domain name "manufacturersexchange", when I pointed out that was a terrible name for a business they said "no business person would notice that". Business never got off the ground.

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I mean even with a dash it's really not a very good name for a business. What does the company even do?

Mind you, self-descriptive company names and domains are more useful for local small businesses; big ones like Google start to get their own meaning. ycombinator? What?

They wanted to start a manufacturing equipment business like eBay, but for factories, which itself was rather silly given how difficult shipping machines would be. They wanted a preliminary design for a 3 month period, but took 3 months to negotiate the contract, so in the end I worked without any input. I think they were completely clueless about the internet or how difficult such a business would be to run, or even market.

Some businesses really can benefit from a good or memorable domain name.

But that market is much, much smaller than it used to be, and most businesses can live or die no matter what their domain name is.

I wonder what their argument would have been. "Business people just aren't observant enough to notice things in general shrug" ?

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