under pressure

July 30th, 2006

I caught about 5 minutes of this fascinating cheapo aircraft reality series program on tv as I was waiting for my noodles to get ready. You've probably seen one of these shows, called "Heathrow <something>" and they try to make it very dramatic and exciting. "Will Jill get on a flight at all today?" "How will Mark resolve the tense situation with the pissed off customers?" Not exactly award winning stuff.

Anyway, they mentioned in passing that Easyjet has just merged with Go Ahead and so they had to turf all the Go Ahead planes to repaint them in Easyjet colors. This job, consuming 12 people around the clock for six days is worth £26,000. Which is interesting. Easyjet, unlike Ryanair, is a dotcom company, every advertisement where you'll see their name it says "Easyjet.com". I guess they were banking that the dotcom suffix would get them more business, because they're so state of the art.

That got me thinking.. putting aside for a moment the advertising costs, if it takes £26,000 to repaint a plane, and Easyjet has... what... probably 100 planes, that's a lot pressure on the shoulders of the guy in Easyjet's IT department who's responsible for renewing the domain name. If he let it expire and the domain sharks got it, he would forever be known as the guy who lost in excess of £2,600,000 on four letters.

Now Ryanair, they're smarter. If they should one day, god forbid, lose their domain name, they can come back with ryanair.net or ryanair.com.nc or whatever. But Easyjet can't, they're committed. Better not let it expire, domain guy.

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1 Responses to "under pressure"

  1. erik says:

    If I were domain guy, I'd be very nervous