You're an integrator. Your co-founder is either a visionary, or he's lazy, or maybe both. I don't have enough info to know for sure.
At any rate, each of you handling separate sides of what is basically two different businesses is a mistake. Sure it does a nice job in giving each of you autonomy, but it's terrible for maximizing each of your unique skill sets.
The most exciting aspect of this coming to fruition is that it may become socially acceptable to be 'unreachable'. The shit I get from my social circle for not answering phone calls or taking hours to respond to texts is annoying af.
They matter incredibly, just not for the criteria which OP believes makes a good name. Naming isn't logical. No one cares if the name perfectly represents what your company is and does. But it damn well better sound good and be memorable. In a society so focused on images and status a good name could be the difference between success and failure. (depending on the type of product)
Yup, so much better. As someone who knows namecheap and what they offer very well, I know all the features are there, and with that knowledge the redesign doesn't look to bad. But this is a very ambiguous homepage to a new visitor. The old homepage may have been cluttered but you could just FEEL what they were offering. I don't think this flat design trend applied to all industries.
If Bing were to overtake Google and become the preferred search engine, would anything really be much different?
I'm no search engine expert but I'm pretty comfortable assuming that Bing would have(and does have)had the same issues with rap genius as Google did. The only real difference is that as the market leader Google had to publicly react to rap genius 'gaming' of their system.
I think what this shows is that yes, this is precisely a product problem because if Bing were at the top we would be having this exact same discussion only with reversed roles.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Google vs Bing is not a lot different than Coke vs Pepsi.
Until we have someone come along with a search engine which is actually a better product, market share will only really be a function of effective marketing.
That said, I think your article does a good job outlining some of the barriers that any potential competitor in this arena should be aware of.
To me the biggest difference between now and then is that the quality of instruction is probably much better now. Not only is the quality better but the number of options is also much higher. Between resources like teamtreehouse, code school, codecademy, youtube and the thousands of pages you can find with google -- people who want to learn to code today have a marked advantage over those who wanted to learn in 1996.
In the end it always comes down to a persons will to succeed. Learning programming is basically a battle to simply keep putting your face in front of the code. The biggest value that resources like teamtreehouse and codecademy offer is that they make it more engaging (read: less painful) and so people are more likely to press on and get to a point where they say "Hey, maybe I can actually be a programmer".