[devoply]

Generic words are not brands. I have no feelings about shoes.com nor can I ever other than I like shoes. I care about certain brand of shoes because they look nice and last a while, i.e. quality. That's why companies fight to keep their brands from becoming generic names.

[gumby]

Indeed, it's a shame that that company Microsoft (remember them? They made a BASIC interpreter for CP/M) chose useless names like Windows and Word.

The string, be it Google (nonsense word, to most people), Windows (generic word), or Apple (real word out of context) is all about what you do with it.

[emodendroket]

Surely this is less common now, but I can remember at one point it was a pretty common behavior to say, "hm, I want some information at shoes" and just try navigating to shoes.com. Probably this became less common because porn advertisers caught on and started redirecting to porn.

[adventured]

Certainly it was expected that that style of navigation would be extremely lucrative. It never turned out that way of course. In large aggregate domain squatters have made some real money over the last 20 years by owning various direct type domains (like weddingshoes.com).

I remember in the mid & late 1990s, during the insane dotcom landgrab, people really believed having that special domain name was everything. At the time, it coincided with people thinking they could build a business overnight and IPO the next week, so having something like Shoes.com to sell to naive investors was crucial. I remember one guy pitching the premise, on CNBC and elsewhere, that he had acquired all the buything.com domains, like buysocks.com, and he was going to build a retailing juggernaut on the back of that.

[emodendroket]

Easy-to-remember domain names are still good. People make a lot of money parking domains and you would expect that to be impossible if they were worthless.