Network Solutions renames their services for added obscurity | Hacker News Reader

Network Solutions renames their services for added obscurity

jgc.org

72 pointsjgrahamc21 comments

Unfortunately this is becoming far too common. The marketing team thinks "hey we need to have a 'proper' name for this product" and they end up alienating and confusing their user-base. 99% of customers know they they want to register a domain and not buy a nsWebAddress.

In my experience this happens when a company starts hiring marketing and sales people that are so far removed from the typical buyers and they eventually have no language in common. It's also a good indicator of a business that is doomed in the not too distant future.

But NS's target market is the other 1% who are too unsavvy to know what a domain is, or that Netsol are the most legendary shitbags on the internet. They don't want those customers googling the name of the product and finding out that it can be bought elsewhere. Marketing knows what they're doing.

Epic MBA WTF.

As an MBA-in-training I resent that! I would NEVER rename services to something that asinine. Although I'm not in marketing... ;)

Epic geek stereotyping :P

No, clearly this crime against logic was committed by a Cocoa programmer.

NSDomainAddress?

The NS suffix is even more confusing for Cocoa programmers.

[[nsWebAddress alloc] initWithDomain:@"example.com"]

Worse, the lowercase "ns" prefix is used by Mozilla. E.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/nsString

The same thought was bouncing around my head while reading all of their new names.

Who uses this overpriced Network Solutions nowadays? I needed to work with it for a client, registering overpriced domain names through them is a huge pain in the ass as they try to sell you all this other nonsense. It's really one long road with obstacles to get it only registered.

People who make registrar decisions based on advertisements, which is a fair amount of non-tech people.

how precisely can they trademark "Design/Develop" ?

They sent me a message about one of my domains which contained the following text "nsWebAddress .COM". I couldn't actually parse that and figured their email system must have been misconfigured.

now your tech support calls can be as fun as ordering coffee at starbucks.

"hi, i'm calling on behalf of customer xyz. i need to have their domain xyz.com unlocked."

"you mean their nswebaddress, sir."

"no, i mean their domain name. xyz.com."

"a domain is an nswebaddress, sir."

"then why don't you just call it a domain name? so, can you unlock it?"

"i can unlock their nswebaddress, sure."

The Starbucks naming conventions drive me crazy because of the fact that they all mean, essentially, "big." So it's impossible to remember which "big" you want for a medium-sized coffee!

They always humor me when I order 'small'/'medium'/'large'.

But also, did you know there's a secret even-smaller 'short' size? See:

http://www.slate.com/id/2133754/

I don't think there's an "animal style" cappucino, though.

I always use this video as an example when I'm trying to make a point about perspective (what you call 'big' and I call 'big' can differ) or obfuscation.

Plus, it's a really well done take on the Starbucks naming regime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFLs9RI8mSA&feature=relat...

Notice how all the new terms are trademarked. That must have played a big role in the decision.

That's exactly it. You can't trademark "Sci-Fi" and you can't trademark "Domain", but these things, you can.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/07/sci-fi-channel-reboot...

what are they going to call their whois service?

nslookup?

FYI they also run namesecure.com, but obscure it pretty well. The interface sucks and the service sucks even more. But it is cheaper than their normal Network Solutions portal.

I switched to namecheap.com instead.

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