Salesforce.com and the Force family namePricing a domain name doesn’t always have to do with a specific valuation strategy. Sometimes a person has a sentimental attachment to a domain name, and he is unwilling to sell it for any price. Take Gordon Force, Sr. of San Jose, CA. for example. He registered
Force.com in the early 1990’s for his company, Force Technology, a technology consulting and design services company. After nearly 4 years of negotiations (WOW!),
Salesforce.com was finally able to acquire Force.com from Mr. Force. They must have made one big offer!
This case demonstrates the untapped opportunity for software domain naming applications that I have been talking about (since that’s been my old world naming forte). Products usually come in suites that need to be inter-related and flexible for future expansion or mergeracquisition. Plus companies like this have all kinds of printed documentation, client legal agreements, trademark applications, packaging, partner web portals… where the name must define the scope of the agreement. All this has to be updated at great expense if a product is launched before the name is secure.
Also note from their website that they have this dream event (used after a slash) like a developer, customer summit as well as a sales achievement conference. All of these events were part of my daily life and the need I saw in b2b for domains that no one was addressing. Many software companies run their events off the vendor’ site. This is not good for a key asset and datbase. The attendees expect a dedicated landing page and few companies have the domains and dedicated servers to back it up.
By looking at these event names and acting as a buyers advocate, one can shop the boards and maybe find a name and make a deal. This is Sahar’s theory of starting over today where you can profit from the game without owning anything.