The REAL reason RealNames is going poof
ZDNet | at | by Mike
It's amazing how many different ways people can find to avoid saying, "We screwed up." I was reminded of this recently when I visited the Web site of a guy named Keith Teare. It was a good idea--but good ideas don't always make good businesses. In fact, the company doors will likely shut for good in a month or two. Why? Teare blames Microsoft. I disagree. Microsoft may have put the final nail in the coffin. But what really killed RealNames was a bad business model.
The fact of the matter is that, instead of making surfing more convenient, RealNames made it more confusing. Type "Pepsi" into the address bar in IE and you'll go to the Pepsi Web site, with a RealNames banner at the top of the window. Type in "Dr Pepper" or "AnchorDesk," and you'll go to the corresponding sites without the banner to tell you how you got there. Type in "Ford Motor," and you'll get a standard MSN search result. To be useful, RealNames had to be consistent and, to do that, it had to be nearly ubiquitous--nearly every logical keyword had to produce a useful result. But instead, I've run across RealNames-enabled sites so infrequently lately, I wasn't really sure the company was still in business.