Not of the times

A substantial amount of the sites I migrate over come from folks who used GoDaddy. The most basic reason is that they are technically bad at their job, but because I work with awesome people, many of them express relief at switching away. Often it because they are feminists, and no longer want to support a company that hyper-sexualizes and objectifies women.

This got me thinking about what it would take to change GoDaddy as a company. Supposedly cultural shifts can happen in a large company, though I’ve never heard of this happening without them failing in a big incident, so the change was just as much about publicity as anything else.

Then I thought about how people talk about really old companies, and how their old policies or marketing materials reflected a time that was different, where women weren’t part of the workforce or whatever other excuse people give for people acting stupid in the past. GoDaddy won’t even have that going for them, though. Their behavior isn’t the norm, and they have a list of bad policies and associations that will stain their reputation.