My 2 cents:
Yeah, .com is king.
cc tld's make sense if the country's own market is strong enough (.de, .co.uk)
Everything else basically doesn't make much sense because people from the street basically don't know the extension and even if you have a great keyword with it, you have to "market" it to people (=loss of $).
Then again, especially in the light of ICANN's latest stunt they try to pull and the possibility of the same proposed terms being applied to .com soon i ask myself this:
Why is it that everybody praises companies like Ireit, Buydomains etc for their great and large portfolios ?
Sure, they can be admired from a domainers point of view for their business sense and buying power etc etc - but am i the only one that sees that single companies that each own portfolios in the amount of xxx,xxx names are a reason as well for the .com/.net space to have no good names avail anymore ?
Like, it's a bit problematic when .com is king but at the same time there are no good names left in .com neither for domainers let alone for the public or internet community.
Think about it - companies owning like 400,000 names or more in a way are just the same a threat to .com/.net space and to the "public domain" aspect of the internet as ICANN is a threat to the .org/.info/.biz space and to the internet community at the moment.
It has become a lose/lose situation : .com is king but no good .com's left, and the alternative extensions are unknown to the public.
Kind of the flip side of the general success of domain business; it's really some domain companies have become *so* successful with aquiring names that if you combine them they kind of have a monopoly for the good names.Nothing left.
Ironic in a way.
Or even more drastically, if you define the .com space as the one consisting of the good .com names (because who wants bad names anyway, be it in .com or any other extension for that matter) then these companies very soon *OWN* the .com space.
Because there are no good names left and they own them.
Simple as that.
Face it: Most people here are crawling around either trying to sell/buy semi-decent .com names because that's all what's left or try to sell/buy great keywords with a crappy extension attached.
Both parties have in common they try to hype their crap as the hottest shi*.
When in reality we all know that the *real* good names are gone and the majority of us is not who owns them.
So next time you admire the big players, think about it twice; maybe as it is with any other monopoly it's not so good if a few single companies have the monopoly on the (good names) .com space ?
Just to be clear: I'm not saying these companies have done anything wrong in legal terms, they're just doing what big players are doing, profit maximation and they're entitled to go for that but still - and if it's just from the public domain view of the internet:
Something has and is going wrong.
Just some food for thought, don't flame me.