Part 12 - The Making of Mega-Park
Once again I want to follow the fictitious game of poker that I wrote about in a number of pervious articles. This is the game with Google, Yahoo and parking companies all sitting around the table. Google has managed to carve out the enviable position of perfect information resulting in them walking around the table to see everyone's hands prior to bidding.
We explored the fact that maybe their may eventuate a mega-park with a large enough tail to "wag the dog". This is worth investigating further and to try and understand why it could or could not happen (ignoring collusion issues of course).
After the bloodbath of the small "cap market" in Australia Fabulous has a market capitalization of about $AU30m. If it wasn't for the different cultures of the two organizations it would make perfect sense to merge Dark Blue Sea with NameMedia which would then have over one million owned domains for sale via the DDN.
I'd scrap the Buydomains system as it doesn't allow instant transfers of non-owned domains. In an industry like domains it makes sense to have a single system and Dark Blue Sea seems to be giving their's away for zero cost. It would be interesting to see how GoDaddy handled this state of affairs with a single player holding such a huge portfolio.
Meanwhile in Germany Sedo and NameDrive need to merge. The major sticking point would be the intense rivalry and angst that exists between the two companies.
After visiting Cologne and both Sedo and NasedomeDrive a couple of weeks ago I think that both companies would be surprised to know that they both thought highly of each other. The senior management of both companies appeared to making a conscious effort to put the past behind them and move onto the future.Once the hatchet is buried (preferably not between the third and fourth vertebrae) then merging both ND and Sedo just makes logical sense. Once again the culture of the two organizations would be a challenge to push through but hopefully not insurmountable. This would really shore up the international front which both ND and Sedo excel in.
In the next article I'll continue to ride the merger train and take a look at how we can create the mega-parking company "DarkHit"
Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmour -- Reprinted with permission -- July 15, 2008