The world wide web, locally

In business school, we continuously look for ways to expand the market for a particular product while standardizing its production.  After all, many of the best businesses of the past 15 years have been those that are scaleable to the world with minimal marginal costs.  Even beyond obvious examples like the internet’s allowance for proliferation of software, there’s been a push to homogeneity by huge multinational corporations as they can produce more cheaply by taking advantage of the economies of scale that their size affords them (think a Starbucks on every corner).   This is globalization.  It makes things cheaper for consumers and standardizes experiences.  This can be good.  But remember that it also makes it very difficult to build and maintain anything at a local level.  Is it any wonder why so many cities feel manufactured now and seem to have lost some of their character?  How could a ‘mom and pop burger shop’ compete with McDonald’s?  How could ‘Al’s Auto’ compete with Meineke?  Well, like me, there’s people who wish that wasn’t so.  Further, we wish we could take advantage of the benefits of that scale without having the cost of an assembly-line experience.  Enter Root Orange (www.rootorange.com).

On at least one front (marketing) this young start-up is giving local companies a fighting chance.  By buying generic domain names and selling them to companies ONLY in their local area, they provide access to the best domains for companies that wouldn’t have the budget to even consider them before.  What does this mean?  Let’s consider two mechanics, Corky and Fred, who both own their own repair shops.  Corky lives in Buffalo and Fred lives in Seattle.  Rather than housing their material on “www.corkyslocalcarmechanicandrepairshop.com” and “www.fredsseattlebasedautomechanic.com” and losing out on all internet traffic to the national owner of “www.autocenter.com”, they can each now rent “www.autocenter.com” within their metro area.  How cool is that?  It’s an opening of a local wide web. What will come out of this?  Hopefully, the ability for small businesses to more aptly compete.  There’s something to be said for the huge company and the quality that they give you.  But I’d like my city to have space for the little guy too.  After all, Corky does a great job and sure knows my car, even if the internet doesn’t know him too well.

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